Crazy for Cozy: The New Vanguard of ASMR
Anastasia in Atmosphere’s “Ladies of the Twilight Theatre.” Illustration by Chris Panicker.
ASMR is something you either get—and fall deep down the rabbit hole—or stay the hell away from. I remember discovering ASMR accidentally around 2014, when I was trying to massage my aching foot after a punishing afternoon of track practice; I stumbled on a “reflexology” video whose narration and background music were so oddly relaxing that it kept me coming back even when I wasn’t in pain. Over the years, I got so into watching ASMR to unwind that I forced myself to quit because I thought I was addicted.
For the uninitiated, ASMR stands for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” and it refers to a subjective phenomenon where people report feeling “tingles,” or a kind of warm current running down their spine, neck, or head in response to audiovisual stimuli such as tapping wooden blocks or squishing slime. It’s like a jacuzzi for the jaded, exhausted mind.
The content genre kicked off on forums and YouTube in the early 2010s and went mainstream by the end of the decade. Suddenly, there were ASMR superbowl ads, news reports, a 21 Savage song called “asmr” where the rapper whispers softly over a menacing Metro Boomin beat, and ASMR YouTubers (ASMRtists) with millions of subscribers. It’s hard to believe that the video style hasn’t been totally exhausted of ideas and converted into a soulless influencer content farm. Returning to watch videos this year, what’s shocked me the most is how weird, extreme, and tingly the content is.
For the vanilla relaxers, there’s still tons of entry-level ASMRtistry being made: the soap carvers, the gentle whisperers, the cranial nerve exam roleplayers. But for the real heads, the tingle trench vets who now suffer from tingle immunity—the term for when you listen too much and develop a tolerance to basic ASMR methods, requiring “harder” ASMR substances—there’s been something like a nuclear tingles race for mutually assured relaxation. A slew of new metas has emerged, from spit-painting to “overexplaining simple things” to the “Giving You a Black Market Lobotomy” roleplay craze. The titles beg you to click: Deep Cerebral Penetration. ASMR 8D to 32D! 200% Sensitive Deep Whisper You Can FEEL in Your Ears. There are types of clips I couldn’t even have imagined half a decade ago, like ASMR that’s basically avant-garde breath play and videos so frantic they’re more like anguish-inducing anti-ASMR.
Nothing turns my brain into a quivering fuzzball faster than “Fast & Aggressive,” the ASMR equivalent of nightcore music. Flooded with jittery whispers and kinetic hand movements flying everywhere, these videos feel like you’re participating in a yoga session at 2x speed. I remember YouTuber seb ASMR’s “FASTEST 1 MIN ASMR EVER” felt blistering, game-changing when he dropped it back in 2018; nowadays, the unhinged aural assaults by speedrun-soothers like Blissful Zen ASMR and Miss Manganese make his attempt feel sedate. Creators will tell you to look at certain areas of the screen or do mental math in an instant; Rebecca ASMR often whirls multiple items at once while asking you to switch your focus between them every half-second like you’re performing a hand-eye coordination test. Some videos are so aggro they advertise “slamming” and “banging” in the title to tantalize people. There is indeed even a type of ASMR where creators simulate stabbing you and beating you until you faint. The line between relaxation-core and Merzbow is fading fast.
To take it to the next level, ASMRtists will simulate a stutter, so their words hit your ears in frenetic and enticingly jagged patterns. The canniest creators maximize the effect by combining rapidfire stutters with “breathy whispers” and an anticipatory trigger like almost saying something but then freezing in place, so it’s hard to predict when they’ll make the noise and they keep you in a kind of stupor-suspension. Creators then layer the vocal mayhem with finger snaps and visual movement to create a mosaic of calming chaos. They’ll even use specific phrases, like “stipple” or “nape of the neck,” that glide off the tongue.
The breathy-stutter GOAT might be ASMR Ceri, whose videos verge on straight-up hyperventilation. There’s something almost terrifying about the way her voice leaps up and then suddenly stops—it feels like I’m in the backyard of Queens nightclub Nowadays coaching my friend out of a K-hole. In one recent video, she said the technique was so taxing to perform that it made her lungs sore. “I get exhausted to the point of like, it makes you feel nauseous because you’re s-s-s-so short, so short of breath short of breath short of breath,” she said while gasping and stretching her voice. In the comments, people say she gives them tingles like nobody else.
The innovations go beyond the vocal frontier. The visual mischief on the channel Patrick’s ASMR makes you feel either snoozy or seasick—see a clip where he simulates you (the camera) riding a swing in a train yard, rocking the screen up and down in an arc. People have gone berserk with green screens, like SkepticalPickle’s hallucinatory haze of a video where her nails and makeup morph into neon cyclones and every sound drips with reverb. One of my favorite recent finds is a Korean-language creator sprinting between the left and right channels of the mic, landing critical-hits on your ears by tickling both sides in a mad volley. “I'm tingle immune and this was the first thing to give me those heavy tingles,” one commenter praised. “I’m talking full back spasms.”
The amount of elaborate ASMR roleplays now is astonishing. An entire niche revolves around people acting like your “bitchy friend” and verbally abusing you; on the flipside, there’s “Thicc Himbo Whispers Sweet Nothings In Your Ear.” At the weirder end, you’ll find hyperspecific period pieces: Imagine it’s 1663 and you’re the kitchen hand for a cook who’s been ordered to bake an apple pie. Imagine it’s the 1300s and a nun tends to you as you convalesce with the Black Plague. There’s also Angelica’s “Your Period Finds Out You’re A Lesbian” and “6 Wives of Henry VIII Confide in You” and Ephemeral Rift dressed in a baleful alien costume interrogating you. If that’s not strange enough, there’s also ASMR vore, a supposedly soothing variant of the paraphilia that involves wanting to eat or be eaten by another creature. Hundreds of thousands of fans have flocked to YouTube clips offering “Full Vore Tours,” which means stomach growling and “intestine ambience” that makes you feel like you’re nestled in a warm belly.
In terms of pure spectacle, barely anyone can compete with ATMOSPHERE. She’s developed an entire “Atmosverse” of lore around Medieval and Gothic worlds, with a roster of fictional characters including us, the viewers, playing a protagonist called the Sleepwalker. The channel’s solo creator, Anastasia, told me she came to ASMR from a background studying cinematography, psychology, and stage production. She uses Adobe After Effects, Audacity, even Unreal Engine to sculpt intricate sets and constantly shifting background visuals. In “Ladies of the Twilight Theatre,” the 67th video of her ongoing series, you’re whisked around fog-filled courtyards and shadowy hallways, following women who make cryptic warnings about how we’re “burning.”
She speaks about her videos like they’re part of a grander conceptual vision, referencing the theatrical technique à part (when a character speaks directly to the audience, which she sees as analogous to ASMR roleplays) and how she’s fascinated by the divide between realism and symbolism. “The level of immersion that ASMR offers adds an even more personal touch for each viewer—as if they are journeying through this world alongside my characters,” she says. Her predictions about how ASMR will develop as a genre read like wall text for a post-internet exhibition: “I see it as the opening chords of a much larger symphony of the future. It’s only beginning to be explored, along with the science of mirror neurons.” This is ASMR as high art—and Anastasia might be the only director that actually wants you to fall asleep to her films. She believes the next vanguard of experimental ASMRtists will rewire the scene with VR.
From afar, it’s hard to imagine how ASMR is a “form” you can push forward in a meaningful way. After all, it’s so easy to distill it into a bland formula of binaural 3Dio-brand mic plus mouth sounds. Dive deeper and you’ll encounter so many oddballs going out on a limb just trying weird shit, which then filters into other creators’ styles. The coolest thing about ASMR is how it operates like a network of isolated experiments—creators picking up on other ASMRtists’ trigger-inventions and using it in their own routines, working together to concoct an audiovisual folk tradition. At best, it reminds me of the way music evolves: little mutations that artists discover—vocal tics, drum patterns, playful Auto-Tune misuse—and collectively push forward, forming an ecosystem of incremental advances. This is what Brian Eno described as “scenius,” or the way collective clusters can make larger leaps than any singular genius. Rather than Jersey club triplets or shoegaze tremolo, this is a language of sk-sk noises and nail scrapes, of Kelly Belly “wave crash” and RaffyTaphy “setting and breaking the pattern” triggers.
ASMR is an inherently cringe pastime—both creating it and admitting you spend time before bed worshiping some disembodied face whimsically waving their hands on the screen. But at the heart of it is an army of armchair scientists tapping into the unknown, shattering relaxation boundaries and spewing gibberish all in the hopes that someone out there will tingle.
What I’m listening to:
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
