At the start of this year, the internet seemed to collectively land on nostalgia for the pop culture of exactly 10 years ago. On Instagram, users mined their phones’ camera rolls for pictures from 2016, offering miniature time capsules from a period that looms large over the current era. When you look back, it does seem as though something special crystallized then. It was the year of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Frank Ocean’s seminal Blonde, Rihanna’s Anti, and Drake’s Views — a set of records that arguably laid the groundwork for the decade to come.
In the early weeks of 2026, the idea that we’ve returned to the sensibility of 2016 has taken hold of popular culture. We’ve got a new A$AP Rocky album, and Kanye continues to thrust himself into the headlines. Travis Scott is on the cover of Rolling Stone. Across TikTok, young people have declared that 2026 is the new 2016, mining the archives of since-demoralized millennials for aesthetic inspiration. Songs like “Kwik Trip,” from Milwaukee artists Lightris and sero, manage to infuse the sparkly optimism of Obama-era indie with a tinge of TikTok-addled brilliance. Fittingly, the song went viral at the top of this year, soundtracking something called “Happycore.” One of the year’s buzziest debuts so far comes from Xaviersobased, a 22-year-old musician who’s part of a vanguard of digital-native artists whose music is at once informed by the 2010s (Xavier’s name is a nod to millennial rap entity Lil B the BasedGod) and entirely of the moment.
2016 arguably marked the beginning of the streaming era, when mass adoption of platforms like Spotify upended the ways audiences found music. It makes the music of that year feel split between two generations — the transition from big-name superstars to dispersed micro-celebrities. It’s easy to look at the bevy of releases from that year as evidence of some unique alchemy, but the reality is that’s just how things used to be. Frank Ocean’s mixtape Nostalgia Ultra came out in 2012, followed quickly by Channel Orange the next year. Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, which would in a way precipitate his beef with Meek Mill, dropped in 2015; so did Meek’s Dreams Worth More Than Money.
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When Kendrick Lamar released To Pimp a Butterfly in the spring of that same year, its shelf life wasn’t contingent upon its ability to penetrate a constantly shifting algorithm. “Alright” emerged as an anthem to protests against police violence throughout 2015 and 2016 in an organic way that, today, feels nearly impossible thanks to the sheer speed of online culture. It’s why we’ve often struggled in the past decade to identify a clear “song of the summer.” There can’t be a soundtrack to popular culture if everyone’s watching a different movie.
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In hindsight, 2016 feels like the moment our collective understanding of the world tore like the membrane of a balloon popping. That was the last time it felt as though there was a coherent popular culture, before everything fractured into algorithmic bits spread across hours of screen time. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, much has been made of the supposed collapse of contemporary culture. Books like W. David Marx’s Blank Space suggest that we’ve entered a flattened culture in which originality has fallen by the wayside, replaced by predictable, safe cultural products. More than the expected cycle of nostalgia, the current fascination with the era around 2016 carries the weight of mourning. The world that existed then feels like the last vestige of a connection to some kind of human lineage, a throughline of history that all living beings more or less agreed on. Of course, it was also the year of Trump’s first election and Brexit, the beginning of the long-running nightmare of modern political culture.
There is, however, something hopeful about the current generation’s instinctive grasp of the significance of 2016. There’s a sense that the past decade has been some sort of fever dream. Even the podcast grifters who, radicalized by the so-called “woke” agenda, helped get Trump elected twice, now seem eager to renege on the favor. The reactionary anti-woke moment of the 2020s feels as deflated as ever, and our collective nostalgia for 2016 appears to offer the chance at something of a do-over. Maybe this time we won’t screw it up.
