Taganistas may know Lil Internet from various endeavours over the years – his music videos (Beyoncé, Diplo), his high-concept DJ mixes, his ever-present voice on Twitter. But since 2017 his main focus has been New Models – a website, podcast and Discord that’s emerged as just the sort of music-and-ideas safe space that dorks like us usually bemoan the loss of.But the reason we finally asked Lil Internet to join us on No Tags is his latest music project – a brand new genre he’s calling gencore (or Generative Hardcore). Showcased across two mixes released in 2024 and 2025, gencore tracks are completely AI-generated from the software Udio, and adhere to the following three rules:All gencore vocals must be forced hallucinations, output by the model in ‘instrumental’ mode (as a distinctly inhuman glossolalia or phonetic ur-language).Whoever creates the gencore should not personally be able to say ‘this sounds like X artist or genre’ (except gencore).To recreate a gencore track using traditional (non-generative) means must be very difficult, very expensive, or simply impossible.Perhaps most controversially, Lil Internet proposes that because gencore is ‘made in the tradition of sample-based, breakbeat driven dance music’, it arguably marks an evolution – or maybe even the endstate – of what music critic Simon Reynolds named the hardcore continuum. He opines: ‘Could one even argue that the big AI companies – sampling everything we type, everything we upload, everything we do – follow the same protocol? Perhaps the hardcore continuum has expanded from something we listen to into something we are living through.’Obviously this was catnip to us – especially as we spent an entire episode last year arguing that AI-generated Japanese city pop must be one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.We spent a great hour with Lil Internet talking about gencore and the AI music landscape, how Udio’s quirks give AI music ‘soul’, the moral boundaries of AI music, and Bandcamp’s recent AI