Oh, The Places We'll Go
Six music predictions for 2026
This past month was a pretty dry one for scene reports as publications shifted to their end-of-year and “best of” coverage, so I’ve decided to mix it up a bit with this month’s post. Instead of looking back, I’m embracing the New Year spirit and putting forward six predictions on what I think we might see in the music world in the new year. Will all these happen in 2026? Maybe not, but I’m fairly convinced they’ll all happen in one form or another eventually. This year seems as good a year as any.
2026 Predictions:
Reparto will shake up the underground club circuit via Miami
Zamrock’s revival will get a boost from a sample on a Kendrick track
K-pop will return to its roots
The Guardian will cover 3-Step
More regional pop from the 70s and 80s will be unearthed
The Mongolian and North African rock scenes will connect
1. Reparto will shake up the underground club circuit via Miami
Reparto, the street music style sweeping through Cuba, has had a big year, spreading outside its island home and into the pages of mainstream music publications like Rolling Stone and Grammy.com. To the untrained ear (e.g. mine), the genre sounds like an updated reggaeton with more complex rhythms, thanks to the addition of Cuban clave and other endemic percussion patterns in place of (or addition to) the dembow riddim. That additional complexity adds depth but also may make it harder for the genre to produce a cross-over hit on the order of “Despacito,” since “rhythmic complexity” doesn’t necessarily do songs any favors if their goal is to appeal to the broadest audience possible.
But you know who does love rhythmic complexity? Underground house producers, who have been embracing ornery beat structures since jungle arrived on the scene in the 90s. The (relatively) recent championing of footwork shows that appetite is still strong, and the scene’s even more recent love affair with Latin rhythms indicates there’s already pathways for cross-pollination. Although I doubt “reparto” will become a buzzword in electronic music circles because it’s not actually an electronic music genre, it could still be influential in prompting more experimentation around how Latin beats can be situated within house music.
And I’m guessing that influence will come from Miami, which, in addition to having a huge Cuban population, has started to garner more attention in underground house scenes as artists like Nick Leon have helped put it on the map. Frankly, this experimentation is probably already happening, but I could see it being accelerated (or at least made more visible) if reparto’s influence appears on a breakthrough house anthem. If the next “Xtasis” pulls in reparto rather than raptor house, we could start seeing the clave getting as much attention as the dembow on dance floors in the next few years.
2. Zamrock’s revival will get a boost from a sample on a Kendrick track
In case you haven’t heard, Zamrock is having a moment. Tyler, The Creator has sampled the Ngozi Family, and now Sampa the Great is repping her country’s homegrown rock genre with an upcoming album that she’s teasing with fun neologisms like “nu zamrock.” The stage is set for Zamrock to lengthen its stride in 2026, and I’m predicting its resurgence will be supercharged by a new K.Dot song sampling one of the genre’s 70s-era pioneers. Now that Kendrick Lamar has dispatched Drake and squarely positioned himself at the top of rap royalty, the Compton-born king has a solid window to re-engage some of the roving creativity that powered To Pimp A Butterfly. And similar to Butterfly, I wouldn’t be surprised if he looked back to Africa for inspiration. If he does, Zamrock seems like it would be the perfect source material for him to pick up.
3. K-pop will return to its roots
Sorta. As a genre, K-pop has always been more “rooted” in global pop music than traditional Korean styles, so one could argue it’s never actually strayed far from its origins. Over the last few years, though, K-pop has matched its forebears, proving to the world that Korean pop stars could command the same sorts of international audiences as those from Europe and the US. This success has turned K-pop into a household name but also made it start to sound a bit too much like all the other chart-toppers, risking a descent into the vapid uniformity that has plagued pop music in the past. At the same time, K-pop’s relentless focus on global success has started to alienate the Korean fans that elevated it before it was a cross-border powerhouse.
The stage is set for a pivot. Now that no one can doubt K-pop’s star-making power, the genre’s pioneers have an opportunity to assert their Korean beginnings in a way that makes them stand out but doesn’t alienate them from the mainstream. Bad Bunny’s DeBi TiRaR MaS FOToS has provided a shining example of how albums can achieve massive popularity with songs that are clearly tied to a specific place and culture, and I have to imagine K-pop’s plugged-in PR strategists are taking notes. There’s been some recent speculation that K-pop’s future might lie in Korea’s past, and while I doubt gugak fusion will become K-pop’s guiding force in the future, I expect there will be more experimentation along the lines of what we saw circa 2021 (e.g. this or this).
Whether it comes off as authentic or gimmicky depends on how it’s executed. It could be as simple as working a geomungo melody onto a song as more than just a light-touch intro (this actually already kinda happened in 2025). Personally, I hope it comes in the form of a pansori collab. For any haters out there claiming that K-pop is just an East Asian take on hip hop, featuring pansori on a K-pop track would be a fitting reminder that Korea has actually had its own spoken-word music style for centuries. Maybe a collaboration with a dyed-in-the-wool pansori singer wouldn’t translate well, but bringing on a group like LEENALCHI could. The band has plenty of practice working pansori tropes into poppy-er settings, and they’re already known to K-pop’s Korean fans after one of their songs went viral in a charmingly quirky Korean tourism video. What better way is there to signal national pride than that?
4. The Guardian will cover 3-Step
Every year, a non-music publication picks up on a new musical trend developing somewhere that their readers aren’t as familiar with. This past year, it was budots in the Washington Post, and before that amapiano in the New Yorker. I fully expect this trend to continue, and my guess is that the mainstream’s gaze will shift back to African and the 3-Step genre that’s becoming a continental phenomenon. The genre is commercially viable, shares some sonic DNA with amapiano, and has already received multi-series coverage by Mixmag. All that’s left is for a hit song or popular playlist to bring the genre close enough to Western consciousness that a publication decides to put one of their writers on it. My guess is the Guardian – they’ve traditionally had pretty strong coverage of African music and might be willing to go out on a limb here even before the genre has fully “proven” itself overseas
5. More regional pop from the 70s and 80s will be unearthed
Ever since city pop showed the world that Japanese artists were making bona fide hits back in the 80s, we’ve seen a minor deluge of compilation albums amalgamating lost tracks from pop scenes that previously operated outside of Western view. The 70s and 80s seem to have been something of a sweet spot for the spread of pop music, with international borders growing thinner just as the economies in many countries started to hit their stride. Just in the past year, conscientious labels have dug up underappreciated tracks by artists and bands in Libya, Uzbekistan, and the Iranian diaspora in LA.
I have no doubt that there’s plenty of other gems sitting in dusty crates in record shops across the world, and I expect music heads, emboldened by past successes, will start excavating and re-issuing them at an even sharper clip. I’m going to go out on a limb and say we’ll see at least five new compilations like this in 2026, and, based solely on an unscientific understanding of which countries were seeing more upward mobility in the 70s/80s, I predict that music from Chile, Turkey, and Côte d’Ivoire will be in the mix.
6. The Mongolian and North African rock scenes will connect
One of the most successful international breakouts from the past few decades has been so-called “desert blues,” the hard-hitting rock style crafted by artists in Mali and Niger that splits the difference between local tradition and Western cultural imports. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the globe, Mongolian musicians have been making waves with their own homegrown takes on blues and metal, aided by a shared ruggedness aesthetic and fluency with pentatonic scales. As far as I know, these two regional genres have never co-mingled, which is not entirely surprising given the vast geographic and cultural differences between the two places.
Globalization has a habit of compressing both those things, though, and I expect the two scenes will find each other eventually. Maybe The Hu will tap Bombino for a feature, or maybe Tinariwen and Yat-Kha will jump in the studio together. Whatever the route, I continue to believe this is more a matter of “when” rather than “if” and that, at some point, “desert blues” will shed its Afrocentric interpretation and follow the Silk Road from the Sahara to the Gobi.
