When millions of TikToks are generated a day, and songs are snipped from every corner of the internet to meet that frenzy, tracing the anatomy of a TikTok hit can seem futile, like attempting to freeze pinballs in place. Scroll in the app for long enough, though, and you’ll notice patterns. Outrageous lyrics and blunt, boisterous beats. Nostalgic callbacks to cartoons and video games. Jarring croaks and shrieks. One TikTok meme based on recreating corny images in the style of the how-to website wikiHow is set to a manipulated version of “Walk” by the 21-year-old rapper Comethazine. When the track’s degraded drop hits, TikTok users jump-cut from wikiHow’s ridiculous illustrations to their exaggerated imitations of them.

The sound quality of “Walk” is deteriorated to an extreme, and plenty of TikTok audio sounds like it’s blaring from busted iPhone speakers, no doubt inspired by the raw energy and DIY ethos of SoundCloud rappers like XXXTentacion and Lil Pump. Examples of this crackly, bass-busting sound can be found everywhere, from Yung Spool’s clanking fuckboy anthem “WTF” to Jedwill and Peter Kuli’s snarky generational comeback “ok boomer.”

“People like distortion these days,” says Nashville rapper Lil Taco, 17, who bought the fried, 808-heavy beat for his TikTok hit “Sand Baebees 2” for $15 on YouTube. This homespun quality—the sense that something was created on the cheap in someone’s bedroom—can be crucial to a song’s appeal on TikTok. “People just go crazy to that shit, because it doesn’t sound professional,” adds Hooligan Chase, a fluffy-haired North Carolina rapper behind the TikTok hit “Asshole.” “The masses can relate to it because they feel like they can do it too, almost.”

To work with viral dance moves, the beat has to be loud, energetic, and visceral, as if a supernatural current is jolting the dancer awake. One of the most popular dance moves on TikTok is the Woah, where you ball your fists and swiftly move your arms in opposing circular motions, as if parking a car in reverse, and then roll into a freeze on the beat. One variation on the move drove HL Wave’s pixelated rap track “Gordon Ramsay” toward virality, leading to a video of the real Gordon Ramsay Woah-ing clumsily to the song alongside his 18-year-old daughter, Tilly. Meme-y tracks like “Gordan Ramsay” hinge on moments that act as micro EDM drops—points of peak intensity where the bass punches hard and tension is released—and witnessing Woahs that are perfectly timed to these drops can be as satisfying as watching an Olympic gymnast stick a difficult landing. Dancers will often layer their moves with juddering visuals that simulate an earthquake, to heighten the perceived intensity.

The drop is central to transformation TikToks, a popular style of video where users appear on camera looking a certain way before suddenly switching into a different look. In one example, a video producer from The Washington Post turns into Ned the Newshound, the newspaper’s lovable mascot. That TikTok is set to “Tunnel of Love” by Haroinfather, which samples the theme from the 1998 video game Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Dreamy, enchanted-forest arpeggios lull you into a trance, and then the track drops abruptly, sliding into a suave, nonsensical rhyme: “OK like criss cross, applesauce, lil baby caress me.” Songs with these definitive shifts—including Six the Musical’s “Get Down,” which builds and builds until suddenly deflating into an a cappella ditty or CG5’s “Absolutely Anything,” a fan-made song for the video game Bendy and the Ink Machine that clicks like someone is assembling a machine gun—provide a precise point for transformations to occur, enhancing a video’s potential virality.

The Los Angeles rapper Savage Ga$p, who’s featured on “Tunnel of Love,” has another viral hit called “pumpkins scream in the dead of the night.” He recorded it last October and stuck with the Halloween theme while freestyling over muffled bells, stuttering hi-hats, and rumbling bass. Bits of internet culture are cleverly compressed in the lyrics: The TikTok excerpt includes an allusion to Mariah Carey’s “I don’t know her” meme and a shout-out to the Japanese anime Death Note, which attracted cosplayers to the song. Referencing popular video games and cartoons seems to be a convenient tactic to boost a song’s profile—Lil Nas X’s second single, “Panini,” is based on a character from the Cartoon Network series Chowder, and SPLASH DADDY’S hit “Wii TENNIS” is named after the popular Nintendo sports series.