What Is HexD? The Bitcrushed Sound That Came Before Sigilkore

What is hexD? It is an internet microgenre built on a DJ mixing style that bitcrushes, speeds up and pitch-shifts existing songs until they sound glitched out. HexD took shape in 2019 around the online collective Hexcastcrew, whose members described the process as “hexing” a track, like casting a spell on it. Its heavy bitcrushing became the direct sonic ancestor of sigilkore and krushclub.

HexD rarely gets written about outside Wikipedia and fan wikis, even though sigilkore, a far better known style, openly borrows from it. This guide covers where the name came from, how the sound works, the key releases and artists, and what hexD turned into.

What is hexD, and where does the name come from?

The name comes from Hexcastcrew. Members of the collective called their editing process hexing: running a song through heavy bitcrushing, speeding it up and pitching it higher so that it comes out distorted and unstable. The Hexcastcrew member Stacy Minajj is credited with putting the term into circulation in 2019.

That makes hexD less a way of writing songs than a way of treating them. A hexD mix can take trance, cloud rap or almost any other source and “hex” it, in the same way nightcore takes a pop song and speeds it up. Alternative Press summed up the treatment in 2021 as sped up, bitcrushed and glitched out.

Origins: Hexcastcrew, Reptilian Club Boyz and Dismiss Yourself

HexD grew out of the late 2010s US internet rap underground, and several threads came together in 2019.

• she_skin. The West Coast producer explored bitcrushed trap before the scene had a name and is often listed as an early pioneer.
• Reptilian Club Boyz and Hi-C. The internet rap collective, formed in 2016, supplied the source material for hexD’s founding mix. Nashville rapper Hi-C, associated with the collective, is described as a key influence on the style.
• “Rare RCB hexD.mp3” (June 2019). Stacy Minajj, also known as tomoe_theundy1ng, released a mix that sampled Reptilian Club Boyz and is treated as the scene’s starting point.
• Dismiss Yourself. The netlabel uploaded the mix to YouTube on August 23, 2019, and Pitchfork later credited it with helping kickstart the hexD scene. In April 2020 it released Surge Compilation Vol. 1, where the artists found a shared identity.

The roots go further back. Wikipedia’s account of the genre points to the influence of SpaceGhostPurrp and Cartier God, and to the 2011 Untrance mixtape Deleted Seniors, one of the first releases to use heavy bitcrushing as an aesthetic choice rather than a flaw. In the early 2020s the scene briefly went by another name, surge, the same word used for that Dismiss Yourself compilation.

What hexD sounds like

Bitcrushing is the core of hexD. The effect lowers the bit depth or sample rate of audio, which strips out detail and adds a harsh, digital distortion. HexD producers apply it to single instruments or to the whole master track, then speed the result up and pitch it higher.

• Source material: mostly trance and cloud rap, though the treatment works on any genre.
• Tools: drum machines, Auto-Tune, synthesizers, pitch shifters, samplers and hi-hats.
• Feel: the student radio station WKNC compared the style to low-quality trance and EDM from early internet anime music videos.

The visual side matters as much as the audio. HexD cover art and videos lean on anime, early Web 2.0 graphics and edits made with Blingee, the glitter-heavy GIF editor from 2006. The result is deliberately low quality, compressed and nostalgic, closer in spirit to vaporwave than to polished rap visuals.

Key hexD artists

Beyond Hexcastcrew, these artists are most often tied to hexD:

• Yabujin, a Lithuanian rapper and one of the scene’s best-known European names.
• Fax Gang, which Alternative Press described in March 2021 as hexDers merging the style with shoegaze.
• ZBITO18, $pirit Gurlz and HelloKittyWaffenDivision.
• Blackwinterwells and the Helix Tears collective.

By 2021 the scene had spread in several directions, with artists merging hexD with shoegaze, emo rap and glitchcore, and SoundCloud became its main home.

HexD vs sigilkore vs krushclub

HexD’s biggest legacy is the family of styles that took its bitcrushing and built songs around it.

Sigilkore’s pioneer Luci4 borrowed hexD’s bitcrush and applied it to original rap songs about magic and ritual. Krushclub then added jersey club rhythms and took the sound to TikTok. HexD also runs alongside digicore, which shares its Discord and SoundCloud roots. For a closer look at how the bitcrushing idea keeps mutating, see our guide to jugg edit rap, and the hexD entry on Wikipedia for its full source list.