Hella Sketchy

To understand the sound of SoundCloud's mid-2010s explosion, you have to know Hella Sketchy. The Austin-born producer, Jacob Thureson, was an architect of the scene, building a following off bright, lo-fi synth melodies that felt pulled from a forgotten Japanese RPG. He started dropping his own auto-tuned vocals over these beats, creating a short-circuiting, bittersweet template for melodic rap that crystallized on his definitive track, “Spent a Check.” Thureson died in 2019 at just 18, but his work became a ghost in the machine—a widely-imitated blueprint for the bedroom producers and rappers who followed, whether they knew his name or not.