Culture
VICE Publishes List of Songs That Sound Like a Carpet Hallway
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
NEW YORK, NY. VICE Media, the outlet that once embedded journalists with warlords and is now apparently embedding them inside a made-up beige hallway from a Reddit thread, published a listicle this week pairing four 1990s dream pop songs with the Backrooms, a horror concept originating from a single grainy photograph of an empty office interior posted to 4chan in 2019.
The Backrooms, for the uninitiated, is a fictional infinite space consisting of yellow wallpaper, wet carpet, and humming fluorescent lights, and it has inspired a web series, a 2026 theatrical film, and now, apparently, a VICE music column with a word count of eight hundred and a thesis statement of 'these songs feel like that.'
The four songs selected were Beach House's 'Myth,' Slowdive's 'Alison,' Mazzy Star's 'Fade Into You,' and a Cocteau Twins track the author admitted in a parenthetical they had only listened to once, 'while kind of asleep.'
Beach House, a band from Baltimore that has spent two decades making music that sounds like a dream you can't quite remember, was described in the piece as 'the sonic equivalent of wandering a sub-level with no exits.' Victoria Legrand could not be reached for comment, presumably because she is already in the Backrooms and has been for some time.
Slowdive's 'Alison' was praised for its 'crushing reverb that mirrors the psychic weight of infinite liminal space,' a sentence that was written by a human adult who graduated from a university. The band, which spent most of the 1990s being told their music was too slow and boring, could not have imagined that their legacy would eventually be rehabilitated by a horror meme about a building with no doors.
The Cocteau Twins entry ran to approximately forty words, most of which were the phrase 'you know?' used in three different grammatical contexts.
The author, a freelance culture writer based in Brooklyn whose bio lists their pronouns and a Substack about 'slow cinema and grief,' filed the piece on a Tuesday and described the assignment in a since-deleted tweet as 'genuinely the most meaningful work I have done this year.'
VICE's editorial team, operating under what sources describe as 'a content calendar that has given up,' greenlit the piece in eleven minutes. A senior editor replied to the pitch email with the word 'yes' and an accidental period that several staff members interpreted as passive aggression.
Readers in the comments section were divided. Several said the list 'totally nailed it.' One user named HallwayFan_1997 said Mazzy Star should have been ranked first and called the current order 'a war crime.' A third commenter simply wrote 'add Grouper' and received forty-seven likes, which is more engagement than the article itself generated.
Grouper was not contacted for comment.
The Backrooms film, which opened in March 2026 and grossed thirty-one million dollars against a twelve-million-dollar budget, does not feature any of the four songs on its actual soundtrack.
Its score was composed by a 34-year-old from Portland who described his process as 'making sounds that feel like forgetting where you parked.'
He is already in talks with VICE for a follow-up list.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4-dream-pop-songs-from-the-1990s-that-could-soundtrack-the-literal-backrooms/