I think the lo fi mood is going to carry over into the 2020s

At best, the millennial sound flirts with escape and experimentation (Frank Ocean, Childish Gambino); much of it has a taste for shameless maximalism (Ariana Grande, Rihanna). Even now, the music remains spellbound with movement. It won't sit still, it refuses to remain calm. In a time when the very idea of movement is cause for national outcry—the debate over immigration found itself at the center of American politics, and I doubt it will be unfastened anytime soon—Gen Z artists have decided to create music that, instead, finds power in creative equilibrium, in staying put.

Every generation yearns for a voice, for voices and for music meant to capture the times. With Gen Z, the sound is sneakily unradical. (Of course, not all Gen Z artists fit within the designation; acts like Brockhampton and Steve Lacy love to test boundaries.) The moods and modulations of the artists are less subversive, more direct. If millennial artists were more consumed with the possibility of sound and genre-fusing, Gen Z has mostly turned that focus inward, consumed with the possibility of self. But this look into the interior, I would suggest, is not a selfish one. It's merely another mode of speaking to the times, of understanding where we are and where we might go next.