Tropical House

Tropical house isn’t so much a genre as a form of musical wish fulfillment—an attempt to bring a sense of beachside idyll dreamily to life. The pairing of house rhythms with balmy atmospheres dates to the '80s, when the after-hours scene in Ibiza birthed Balearic beat, an eclectic fusion of dance grooves and ethereal melodies. But contemporary tropical house arose in the early 2010s as a response to electronic music’s festival culture: The lazy tempos and wistful marimba melodies were the yang to big-room EDM’s hard-charging yin.