What Is Drain Music? Drain Gang, Draincore and the Stockholm Sound

Drain music is the sound and online community built around Drain Gang, the Stockholm collective of Bladee, Ecco2k, Thaiboy Digital and producer Whitearmor. It mixes cloud rap, trap, art pop and alternative R&B into Auto-Tuned, ethereal songs with introspective lyrics, and in November 2022 Spotify officially listed “drain” as a genre. The music even had its own imitators, a late-2010s internet rap scene called draincore, before that scene renamed itself digicore.

For a European hip-hop audience, drain is a rare case of an internet rap movement that started in Europe and then shaped the American underground. This guide covers what drain music is, who made it, the essential records, and how draincore fits in.

What is drain music?

Drain music is less a strict production formula than an identity. When Dazed reported Spotify’s decision on November 22, 2022, it described drain as a community-driven movement built around Drain Gang’s four core members rather than a single sonic blueprint. What connects the records is a mood: Auto-Tuned vocals, weightless electronic production and lyrics that lean toward youthful disillusionment, delivered through both lo-fi and polished recordings.

The word itself comes from the group. Bladee told i-D in 2018 that “drain is about loss and gain”: you can be drained of energy, or drain something to gain energy, and he said everything he and his friends make is connected to that idea. Fans are known as drainers.

Who is Drain Gang?

Drain Gang formed in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2013. Bladee and Ecco2k met as classmates in 2004, when both were 10, and later played together in a grindcore duo called Krossad in 2008. Around 2011 they met producer Whitearmor through mutual friends, and Thaiboy Digital joined through a producer connection. Yung Sherman is a former member.

The group went through several names first, including Gravity Boys and Gravity Boys Shield Gang, before settling on Drain Gang. It released its first compilation in 2013, signed with the Stockholm label Year0001 in 2016, and parted ways with that label in September 2024. The members now release music through their own Trash Island label. Their most frequent collaborator is Yung Lean, the Stockholm rapper behind the Sad Boys crew.

Essential drain music albums

These are the releases most often used to explain the drain sound. Five of them, D&G, Icedancer, Trash Island, Legendary Member and E, were the picks in Dazed’s 2022 guide.

Whitearmor’s own 2022 instrumental debut, In The Abyss: Music for Weddings, is a useful way to hear the production style on its own. Bladee and Yung Lean also made a joint album, Psykos, in 2024.

Draincore: how drain music became digicore

Draincore was the name for a wave of online rap in the late 2010s that was directly inspired by Drain Gang. It was made mostly by young artists in the United States on SoundCloud and Discord, and it borrowed the Auto-Tune, the glossy electronics and the melancholy of Bladee’s records.

In 2019, the artist lonelee coined the term digicore to replace draincore. Part of the reason was to separate the scene from hyperpop, which was growing fast around 100 gecs at the time. A SoundCloud playlist by curator Billie Bugara helped spread the new name in 2021. The scene’s early hub was Loser’s Club, a Minecraft and Discord server created in 2018, and its associated artists include glaive, ericdoa, midwxst, Quinn and Kmoe. Yungster Jack and David Shawty are named as pioneers.

So draincore and digicore are the same scene under two names, and drain music is the Swedish source it started from. Our digicore guide covers the renamed scene in full.

Why drain music still matters

Drain Gang’s influence runs through several of the styles we cover. It shaped cloud rap in the mid to late 2010s, and inspired the draincore scene that became digicore, which sits right next to sigilkore and hexD in the internet rap family tree.

It also built a global following from Stockholm through an independent label. The group announced a 2022 world tour of 23 shows across Europe and North America, and Dazed has described the drainer fanbase’s devotion to the group’s mythology as almost spiritual. For the full history, see the Drain Gang entry on Wikipedia and the Dazed report on the Spotify genre.