In 2017, Jarylun Moore uploaded his second-ever video to YouTube: a homemade remix of Lil Uzi Vert’s “20 Minutes” accompanied by a looping animation of a pink skeleton. The 20-year-old had digitally slowed the song down to about 85 percent of its original tempo, rendering the vocals thick and elongated, something akin to the sound of a 45-rpm single played at 33. Within a week, the video had 20,000 views. Within two months, it had a million. By April of last year, it had disappeared, but not before leaving an entire internet subculture in its wake.

Moore, known to his 24,000 subscribers as Slater, is regarded among aficionados as the originator of the “slowed + reverb” phenomenon, a simple DIY remixing style that has thrived on YouTube in recent years. Slater provided a blueprint that many others have followed: Start with a moody song that’s already popular on YouTube; ratchet up the sense of druggy melancholy by slowing it down and adding a touch of digital echo; pair it with similarly wistful animation; watch the views pour in.

“It can turn a happy upbeat song into something really dark and heartfelt,” Slater says. Iyad Djellali, another slowed + reverb remixer, agrees: Songs “get more personal, more introspective, almost acquiring a sensation of privacy,” he writes in an email. “Lowering the tempo of a track gives the listener a sense of calmness and a chance to get a hold of the details that the song hides.” Estelle’s 2008 hit “American Boy,” an irrepressibly happy song, becomes unexpectedly forlorn in a popular remix, matching the awkwardly distant body language of the anime couple in its video. The chorus—“Take me on a trip, I’d like to go someday”—starts to sound less like a jubilant foregone conclusion and more like a fantasy that may never be fulfilled. “It sounds like a nightmare trying to disguise itself as a pleasant memory,” reads one YouTube comment.

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As slowed + reverb videos proliferated, the visual aesthetic became more refined, skewing toward romantic and retro-futuristic nighttime scenes sourced from vintage Japanese anime. Apparently slow music set to looped anime—like violent knock-off cartoons or the whispers and clicking tongues of ASMR—is well-shaped to fit some previously unknown keyhole in the minds of viewers and the algorithms that recommend them content. A slowed + reverb remix of Halsey and Juice WRLD’s “Without Me,” set to a clip of an anime character crying glittery tears, has racked up 7 million views. A version of Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know the Better,” set to animation of rolling waves, has 6.8 million. According to Slater, listeners bond over the sense of isolation and sadness that slowed + reverb edits can bring out, turning loneliness itself into a kind of community.

Slater is no longer the most popular slowed + reverb remix account, but his presence looms large. It’s not uncommon to find viewers singing his praises in the comments of videos he didn’t even make. He says his “20 Minutes” video had around 4 million views before it and many others were pulled down for copyright-related reasons last year; a reuploaded version, posted to a copycat account, has nearly 7 million views to date.

Slater is from Houston, where he grew up watching anime and listening to DJ Screw, the late hometown hero who pioneered chopped and screwed music, a clear forebear of the slowed + reverb sound. Screw released hundreds of mixtapes of slow and stuttering reworks of rap songs before his death in 2000, leaving an indelible imprint on the sensibilities of modern hip-hop. Slater’s style differs from Screw’s in key ways, lacking its disorienting “chopped” beats and favoring source material that is dreamier and softer around the edges. But he considers the late DJ to be the progenitor of everything he does. “I always felt that I shouldn’t touch chopped and screwed music,” he says. “One, it’s not really screwed if it’s not by Screw. Two, the chops are sacred to the culture, and not everybody can imitate it. So I would never want to even try to. I’m just glad I’m able to bring it to a wider audience.”

Chopping and screwing also takes a certain technical finesse—DJ Screw achieved his chop effect by quickly crossfading between two turntables playing the same record at slightly different times—that even slowed + reverb remixers admit is more complicated than their process. According to the creators of a channel called Rum World, making a slowed + reverb edit is as simple as it sounds: slowing the song down and adding a reverb effect, a process that can be completed in a few minutes using the free software Audacity. Slater maintains that his audio editing techniques are more involved, but he protects the specifics as a kind of secret recipe.

Slater may have first synthesized the slowed + reverb aesthetic from his own idiosyncratic tastes as one Screw-listening, anime-watching teenager in Houston, but as it spread through YouTube, it became increasingly decoupled from the particularities of its origin and open to new ones. Djellali, a 19-year-old born in Algeria and raised in Spain, had never heard of chopped and screwed music before he started his own slowed + reverb channel, which he named Hound Dog, in reference to Elvis Presley and Big Mama Thornton. His videos hew to Slater’s template except in one key respect: instead of sticking to woozy contemporary rap and pop, he also slows down older tunes that are sometimes comically out of step with prevailing notions of Gen-Z cool. His most popular video, with 2 million views, is a slowed + reverb version of Paul Anka’s squeaky-clean 1959 hit “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” set to a clip of two anime characters gazing into the ocean at night.

“I wanted to be different from other channels,” Djellali says. “I went through a lot of stages: ’50s crooners, ’80s Japanese pop, classical music. I wanted to slow down songs that no one had ever done before.”

Rum World takes a different approach, focusing on current songs with a “psychedelic or spacey vibe” and keeping their audience actively in mind. This has paid off: Rum World’s 92,000-strong subscriber base is nearly four times the size of Slater’s, making it among the genre’s most popular channels. The two people who operate it declined to give their names, but described themselves as 19-year-old African-American men from Houston, “longtime friends” and Screw fans who work together on slowed + reverb videos while attending Prairie View A&M University, an HBCU near their hometown.

They were first inspired to try the style as high school juniors in 2018, after coming across Slater’s edit of Diplo and Trippie Redd’s “Wish.” The Rum World remixers uploaded their own version of the hit, which has since gotten about 4 million views. Their contributions to the slowed + reverb aesthetic are mainly visual and curatorial, they say: their selection of songs, the unconventional punctuation they use to stylize the text of their titles (“kendrick lamar ~ money trees ﾉ slowed + reverb ﾉ”), their emphasis on nocturnal scenes in the anime they choose. Two years after first encountering Slater, they now seem to view him as a venerable but slightly out-of-touch master. “I don’t say this to disparage, but, if I had to guess, what has left Slater to obscurity was his poor song selection,” one of the Rum World remixers writes in an email. “He wasn’t uploading what people wanted to hear.”

What people want to hear, according to Rum World’s highest-trafficked videos, involves a lot of Tame Impala and Travis Scott, two artists whose visions of psychedelia are particularly well-suited to this treatment. Scott, a Houstonian, wears his chopped and screwed influence proudly, while Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker produced a Screw-y song about getting high and feeling like “slow motion” on Scott’s ASTROWORLD. Rum World’s archives also contain plenty of tracks by Tyler, the Creator, whose frequently pitched-down vocals are plainly derived from Houston rap. The songs that people want to hear, in other words, often owe a sonic debt to Screw before they’ve even been slowed, having absorbed it directly or through Screw-influenced artists.

Neither Rum World nor Slater makes a point of mentioning Screw or Houston on their channels, though; such specificity might pierce the uncanny effect that has drawn so many people in. Still, Slater says, “I don’t want people to forget the roots of where this really comes from. I’ll see YouTube comments like, ‘Nice to see chopped and screwed is living on through this art form.’ And a bunch of kids will start attacking that person like, ‘That’s not where this comes from.’ Seeing that hurts my heart.”

Watch one slowed + reverb video and YouTube will invariably recommend you another, and another, and another. Watch enough and you might start to feel cynical about it all: the simplicity of the processes involved, the minimal variation from a clear formula, the way the videos can seem to reduce art forms with rich histories to empty aesthetic signifiers (syrupy vocals and sad anime characters). But Slater and the Rum World remixers are real people from Houston who really love the music of their city. And Djellali, making his eerie remixes of 1950s crooners, working in Spain with no prior knowledge of the Texan DJ he’s imitating, is proof that there’s still room for inspired aberrations on a platform that tends toward homogeneity.

For better or worse, like so much of the internet, slowed + reverb videos exist in a vacuum of historical and geographical context. Tokyo and Houston evaporate, becoming a single nameless city, full of towering high rises, flickering neon, and empty roads, where it’s always 2 a.m. and the love of your life has always just slipped from your grasp. To get there, all you have to do is drive slow.