2010
Kesha slurs, squeaks, malfunctions; here, she gets a little staccato with it.
2010
These are sweet, earnestly lovestruck stutters, the result of Jazmine getting so worked up over impressing a dude that it turns her lips against her.
2010
The cyborgs are getting blitzed now, dousing themselves in oil and grease and draining BuzzBallz till they’re slizzard.
2011
Jonah Weiner declared 2011 “the rise of the stutter in pop music,” and he tracked convulsions everywhere: Coldplay, Drake, Nickelback. At times in “E.T.,” it’s hard to tell what’s an artistic stutter versus a censoring device for radio. But it fits the theme of being seduced by a man-alien whom she begs to abduct her into the cosmos.
2011
Vocal chops were all over the future bass and EDM trap I fell in love with as a teen, but this brostep classic is such a tour de force. It feels like the entire DAW is stuttering, or shuddering in a berserk rage both demented and euphoric.
2014
There’s nothing shaky or incidental about the way these stutters are delivered—imagine a bratty robot girl chewing gum. SOPHIE transforms three simple syllables into a mesmerizing hook that makes my brain hopscotch in its basket.
2018
The most un-karaokable song since Cocteau Twins, and maybe the prettiest, most gorgeously glum stutter tune of the decade.
2019
A very tactile and hand-drawn, kissy kind of syllable stretch-out. She hugs the word “bartender” like she’s holding onto him for as long as she can.
2020
The inane and inventive vocals tore across TikTok and paired perfectly with a style of popular edits called “glitchcore.” Thus began a new era for stuttering in the SoundCloud rap underworld. These songs teetered between cool and garish but could also be serious, as on d0llywood1’s depressive “ihonestlymightjustgiveup.” It felt right that stuttering wasn’t just a brief effect but a structural bedrock in these songs. An attention-deficit generation who grew up playing quick-fire shooters were drawn to speed and stimuli. Stutters are like musical jitterclicking.
2020
Around the same time, sigilkore pioneer islurwhenitalk was casting hexes and whipping the human voice into harrowing gales of word-splatter.
2023
The nervy Detroit MC flexes to the heavens, but the diarrhetic stumble of his flow makes him sound like a fried Napoleon wilting in an isolation chamber.
%25E2%2580%259D.jpeg)
2025
“The stutter can be a musical instrument,” says JJJJJerome Ellis, who builds a vast flickery expanse of piano, sax, dulcimer, and spoken-broken-word.
2025
Inspired by 2020 glitchcore, zayok’s got some of the most frail and intentional stutters. He crafts erratic twitch&b out of bashed-in refrains and volatile beats, singing about offing himself and yearning while his falsettos crack like dropped glass.
2025
We’ve watched as Jane has figured out who they are through music—all their metallic snares and Palkia cries and Amen breaks one more step toward selfhood. In Jane’s agile fingers, overstuffed layers of sound aren’t overpowering, they’re something Jane can earthbend around themselves for a sense of confidence and identity. On a rickety rollercoaster of a track where they question changing their name again, stutters form the central motif: “J-J-J-J-J-J-J.” It’s a set of initials and a person in as much flux as their crazed DAW.
2025
We’ve gone beyond stutters as human quirk and robot cosplay. ocelot and his collaborators in the 25r3set collective use vocal fragments as the base ingredients of a zombified mind-stew. It’s a deeply unsettling and unsettled vision of how it feels to exist today, brain blasted in a sewage cannon of retention-edited stimuli.
2026
Mano and I debated whether the effect in this song is a stutter plugin or vibrato—please, producers, chime in—and if it were vibrato, then I’d have to include Lil Yachty’s “Poland,” but also that then I’d have to include neither, since this is a list of stutter songs. To my plebeian ears, Charli’s ra-aaaa-aa-aaaahk hook sounds less like the wavering warble of vibrato than like A. G. Cook hyperlooped a syllable. It’s the rare musical stutter on a vowel (shoutout Jamie Foxx and T-Pain’s “Blame It”).
