Hardstyle bifurcated into euphoric and raw camps when part of the audience wanted a harder, darker sound

Around 2010–2011 a segment of the hardstyle audience gravitated toward harder, darker material, and the label ‘raw hardstyle’ was coined for it — splitting the scene into a melodic ‘euphoric’ camp and an aggressive ‘raw’ camp. Practitioners note the split was gradual and partly resisted (insiders saw ‘raw’ as simply the harder end of the same evolving style, not a new genre) and partly infrastructural, driven by dedicated sublabels and events for the harder sound. This euphoric/raw divergence is a recurring pattern in electronic dance music: a maturing genre grows a harder and a softer branch that drift into distinct scenes with their own artists and audiences.

Examples

Euphoric hardstyle keeps anthemic, melodic breakdowns and supersaw leads; raw hardstyle foregrounds screech leads and a darker, more aggressive kick. The demand for ‘harder’ is what named the raw branch.

Assessment

Describe the conditions that produced raw hardstyle and state one sonic feature that distinguishes the raw camp from the euphoric camp.