Screw It, Let’s Talk About “Doomer Jazz”

Louis Barnes
4 min readSep 19, 2023
The YouTube thumbnail for “1 Hour of Jazzy Doomer Music,” a now-deleted video that has been reuploaded many times.

I’ve written a couple of articles in the past about musical discussion online to the point where I’m getting a little tired of it. However, there’s a trend that has been on my radar for the past couple of years that I have always wanted to write about. Whenever the idea came into my head, however, I didn’t have the motivation to put finger to keyboard. Now that I’ve given myself enough time (and motivation), I come to you today with some thoughts about the phenomenon that is Doomer Jazz.

Doomer Jazz is a sub-subgenre of music that has become popular on YouTube within the past couple of years. If you were to click on a rather enticing thumbnail of a doomer jazz video, you would be greeted with a ~1-hour-long mix of melancholic and lonesome jazz. Doomer jazz mainly consists of bluesy jazz or sappy ballads. To any jazz enthusiasts out there like me, there isn’t anything that new about doomer jazz.

Something that I find interesting about the doomer jazz phenomenon is that doomer jazz isn’t actively being created. Instead, it is being compiled in playlist format and uploaded to YouTube by random people. In other words, doomer jazz is not a genre of music assigned by the musicians, but instead by the listener.

The aesthetic of doomer jazz is pretty simple. From the tens of videos that I’ve combed through researching for this…

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Louis Barnes
Louis Barnes

Written by Louis Barnes

23. I primarily write about jazz music.

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