Abstract music is a genre characterized by its experimental and avant-garde approach, often featuring unconventional sounds, rhythms, and instrumentation. Emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, it drew inspiration from ambient, electronic, and avant-garde music, with artists pushing the boundaries of traditional music-making. The genre's heyday in the 1990s saw the rise of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), a subgenre that emphasized complex rhythms and electronic manipulation. Abstract music's cultural significance lies in its rejection of mainstream conventions, instead embracing complexity and innovation. It has influenced a range of genres, from electronic and ambient to glitch and breakcore, and is distinguished by its use of dissonance, atonality, and unorthodox production techniques, setting it apart from more accessible electronic styles.

Exit Music (for a Film) [Arr. for Piano by Christopher O'Riley]

Thom Yorke•

Jonny Greenwood•

Ed O'Brien

Single - Released July 24, 2026