Welcome to Amazing Aesthetics, a biweekly column talking about all sorts of aesthetics, their origins, and more!

Our fifth article is on Weirdcore, my personal favorite aesthetic out of the hundreds of aesthetics out there.

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Now, with that out of the way, let’s get into today’s aesthetic!

Weirdcore is a visual and musical aesthetic focusing on nonsensical pictures that cause emotions such as dread, discomfort, and nostalgia.

A big part of this aesthetic is lo-fi or blurry photography. It can also overlap with Kidcore at times, in order to really drive home its nostalgic point.

There’s also what I call Neo-Weirdcore, which is the aesthetic which Weirdcore has become in the 2020s. This particular subset of the aesthetic tends to focus on the same nonsensical edits, but often with a liminal space theme. Common motifs include JPEG houses on hills, eyes with wings (also known as eye angels), mushrooms, and desaturated Kidcore images. It could be considered the happier cousin of Traumacore, an “aesthetic” that is more so a coping mechanism for trauma than anything else. 

The two aesthetics both often have text spread across the images, with messages such as “There is a void inside of me that cannot be snuffed”, “There’s the door! Don’t you want to see what’s on the other side?”, and “Where’d the sun go?”

The aesthetic itself may go back as far as the early 2010s, but the earliest Weirdcore edit with any confirmed date was made in 2017. The genre started to gain popularity as YouTuber DavidCrypt took it upon himself to explain the Weirdcore aesthetic to his YouTube subscribers. However, we sadly can’t track down more popular Weirdcore creators, as the main area used to post Weirdcore is Tumblr, a website and app that doesn’t publicly display users’ follower counts.

Considering what this aesthetic looks like in the first place, it is nearly impossible to express it in fashion. This is one of the few visual aesthetics that doesn’t easily transfer over to your outfits.

However, if you want to try, you could try getting white graphic t-shirts with trippy images on them, along with a pair of ripped jeans and worn shoes. Mushroom or eye accessories are also an added bonus. Other than that, I would recommend dressing up with the same tips I gave in the article I wrote about Kidcore. 

In musical terms, while the music in the linked playlist aren’t all of the Weirdcore genre, this Spotify playlist by luscas with nearly 22k likes seems to be a fair representation of the aesthetic according to the general public.

In conclusion, Weirdcore is the perfect aesthetic for anyone who constantly feels as if they are living in a dream and need an aesthetic that fits that. (Same here, don’t worry.)