TikTokers are the new troubadours
In the distant past, troubadours roamed cities and courts with songs that carried news, heartbreak, rumours, and rebellion. They didn’t just perform—they documented. Songs were memory, emotion, and information, passed from one person to the next. Today, that same instinct lives on—but now it’s happening on TikTok. Music has collapsed back into storytelling, and TikTokers are leading the charge, turning lived experience into sound, almost in real time.
XXJULÍA is one of the artists doing this best. She doesn’t separate music from life. Her tracks feel like emotional downloads, recorded before the dust has settled. There’s no waiting to process the feeling—she captures it as it unfolds. The result is music that sounds more like a confession than a concept. Rough-edged. Honest. Sometimes chaotic. Always true.
She’s not building a persona or curating an image. What you hear is what just happened. Her lyrics come with screenshots, DMs, and emotional timestamps. There’s no metaphor needed when the reality is this vivid. Whether it’s heartbreak, revenge, or the strange freedom of moving on, she treats every feeling like a beat worth keeping.
The production reflects that too. Her sound isn’t polished to perfection—it’s textured, unpredictable, alive. You can hear the world she lives in embedded in the mix. It’s DIY but deliberate. Messy but magnetic. She’s not hiding the process—she’s showing all of it.
This is what makes her part of a wider shift. For Gen-Z artists, the song is often the second draft of the moment. They’re not writing after the fact—they’re writing in it. Feelings don’t wait to be wrapped in metaphor or studio sessions. They appear on feeds, in stories, on voice notes—and now, as tracks that capture the intensity of the moment without filtering it into something cleaner.
And that’s what makes artists like XXJULÍA so resonant. She’s not performing a version of herself. She’s uploading it, looped with a hook and a heartbeat. Music becomes the trace of something real, not a recreation of it. It doesn’t aim to be universal—but in its honesty, it somehow is.
You don’t need to know the full backstory to get what she’s saying. Her voice already carries it. One listen and you recognise the feeling. Maybe because you’ve lived it too—or maybe because this is how you would’ve told it if you had.