alt Hacker NewsIt's not just pop music. This plague has infested metal and it's unbearable.
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This is largely pretty subgenre specific, though. For tech-death the robotic sound of quantized perfection is often a stylistic choice, it's literally a part of the appeal of the music for some people. (An obvious example is Archspire, not my cup of tea, but some people love that production style.)
I don't really hear the same thing as much in doom, black, or more extreme death variants.
Ugh, I've just been listening to Gojira the last few days, and now I wonder if they have been using it themselves. Easy for me to dismiss this phenomenon as "that pop music over there". Do you have some examples? Some other impossibly fast metal bands come to mind as well, like Ne Obliviscaris which I explored briefly. I'm a longtime Dream Theater fan, and they've always been very metronomic without assistance, which has sometimes been a criticism of them. They are resistant to outside producers, so I suspect they have not been using "gridification" in the studio. Though, for a stretch before their original drummer returned, they played live to a click track which some portion of fans did not like.
It's everywhere! This Youtube video points out Autotune being used in TikTok videos, which are short enough already to be forgotten immediately.
This should be at the top of the thread. Metal might be the most obvious exemplar to an untrained ear.
When I hear a drum machine execute with microsecond level precision, I feel like I want to throw my computer through a window. It is instantaneous revulsion. There isn't a ponderous "gee I wonder if this is real/fake" phase of discovery. It's obviously fake and trash. Immediately. Every time.
Orchestral arrangements done the same way might be the only thing that is worse to my ear.
There are situations where having good timing is important, but you cannot put the entire thing on an atomic clock and call it "art".