In October 2025, the New York Times published a short piece with a long headline: “Are You Dreaming of a ‘Mall World’? You’re Not Alone.” The article recounts the story of artist and sudden influencer Jessica Tilton, who gained fame on TikTok by breaking down her drawing depicting the endless mall she routinely visits during recurring dreams.
The mall of Tilton’s dreams is filled with incongruous features, such as a hospital, school, airport, infinite toilets, a dangerous fairground, a highway that links everything but also doesn’t work, and a “grungy campsite situation”, all set against an ocean backdrop. The Times article recounts that Tilton’s subsequent mall videos blew up as many viewers reported having similar recurring dreams of infinite malls, dubbing this online community “Mall World.”
Preceding the Mall World trend but hitting the mainstream around the same time is the so-called
“Backrooms” phenomenon, which began in 2019 with an anonymous 4chan user posting a mysterious image of an empty, yellow, fluorescent lights-powered, windowless room. The image’s perspective suggested that beyond this room lay a series of seemingly endless rooms with the same decor, haunted by the memories of the lost lives of office workers forced to give their best years to capitalism’s demands.
After this initial post, Backrooms gained popularity as others posted similar Backrooms images. Soon, a YouTube series created even more rooms and a Backrooms backstory. All of this culminated in the feature film Backrooms, released by A24 and directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who was responsible for the YouTube video. Set in 1990 with a depressed furniture store owner and his therapist discovering an endless series of office space rooms in the furniture store’s basement, the movie has been a surprising hit, grossing over $300 million worldwide and counting while knocking the latest installment of the Star Wars franchise from the top of the box office charts. The success of Backrooms is a remarkable accomplishment, given the director’s age, the film’s $10 million budget, and the fact that it’s based on a hand-drawn image that was posted online.
The connections between both Mall World and Backrooms are many. Both gained popularity in grassroots-powered online communities and have subsequently poured over into mainstream cultural awareness. Mall World and Backrooms suggest associations with a mid-’80s to early-’90s milieu of malls and office culture. Finally, both explore the feeling of liminality, which, in architect Karl Emil Koch’s words, is “fuzzy and more open to possibilities” while also transmitting “a sense of nostalgia, lostness, and uncertainty.”
Over the past few years, there has been a type of music that possesses similar liminal attributes to Mall World and Backrooms. Oneohtrix Point Never, Shrunken Elvis, and BASIC create imagined, uncanny spaces generated from reclaimed sounds from the corresponding mid-1980s to early ’90s. This music summons images of the mall, the central public gathering space of that time, as well as specific details such as the distinct smell of an anonymous office park, evoking the air quality and style of furnishings from a visit to the dentist.
At first, the instant shock of recognition of this Mall World / Backrooms music is slightly sickening, yet ultimately Proustian-ly satisfying in its uncanny familiarity. It recalls a strand of our musical past that, for those of us who lived in that era, never thought would be or even want to be revived, much less enjoyed and celebrated.
Oneohtrix Point Never’s Mythologized Dentist Office
A remembrance of past dentist appointments inspired Daniel Lopatin, the American electronic music composer, producer, and songwriter who records under the name Oneohtrix Point Never, to create the music for Tranquilizer, which was released by Warp Records in November 2025, just after the Times’ Mall World article. In a 2025 Tone Glow interview just before the record came out, he describes the music being played during a particularly traumatic visit to the dentist as “a proto-’this is an unpleasant place to be, no one likes it here, so we’re gonna put on soft rock’ situation.”
He went on to say that he “mythologized” that experience and it came up when focusing on the details of photographs from a Thai restaurant and “looking at the palm trees and I could see these tiny slits in the drop tiles—they looked like dim stars, like a galaxy. Who’s to say that the palm trees are any more special than the drop tiles?”
Yearning to create music that would capture this feeling, Lopatin fortuitously rediscovered an Internet Archive trove of once-lost, early 1990s commercial sample music. This collection became the foundational building block of Tranquilizer. In the same Tone Glow interview, Lopatin acknowledged a “gratuitous ugliness” to the original source music but sought to amplify the beauty inherent to this music by “finding and respecting the excellence of this muzak” since it “was made by people with personalities who were given a directive to have less personality, or maybe they were trying to have their peacock feathers shown. It has all that variety and entropy and chaos.”
Tranquilizer’s eighth track, “Cherry Blue”, is a good representation of Lopatin’s goal to summon bleary, 30-year-old public space memories. He takes the requisite synth and sax sounds of that era’s music and stretches out the ambient textures into an endless, glistening tranquility, attempting to capture the sound of widening ripples of a stone dropped in water.
One of the attributes of Mall World and the backroom of the furniture store featured in Backrooms is the limitless nature of these spaces. “Cherry Blue” — as well as the rest of Tranquilizer — possesses this same immense, immeasurable quality. It’s not that “Cherry Blue” is timeless, but rather there’s a blurring of time when listening to it, provoking an uncanny, but not necessarily unpleasant response.
In the Tone Glow interview, Lopatin cops to the inevitable description of his music as “hauntology”, the classification created by cultural critics Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds for a trend of early 2000s British electronic music utilizing samples from BBC library music. Reynolds described hauntological music as “eerie electronics fixated on ideas of decaying memory and lost futures.”
While the British form of hauntology is largely spooky and, yes, haunting, it is also seeped in regret and a mournfulness of unachieved promise. Alternatively, Lopatin’s form of hauntology is something different. There’s a wistfulness in these fleeting memories of the ruins from the early ‘90s. It’s not nostalgia but gently reminds, “You forgot how the music of those meditation tapes you ordered off of late-night television sounded like and felt.”
“Waterfalls”, the last track on Tranquilizer, is the closing statement of Lopatin’s take on hauntology. It opens with gorgeous, water-feature-in-a-restaurant sound effects before giving way to a melody played by a synth that is supposed to sound like a sax. It builds to a triumphant ending that might originally have been designed as the closing credits of a movie, but instead is the music playing in the corridor outside the theater. With “Waterfalls”, Lopatin reclaims the feeling of this imagined original intent and forces the listener to remember and bathe in specific sensory memories previously left behind.
Shrunken Elvis’s Haunting Mall World
Shrunken Elvis approaches the musical feel of Mall World / Backrooms from the opposite end of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Tranquilizer. The music on the band’s first, self-titled release, which was released the month before the Mall World article, could be mistaken for the original commercial music that Lopatin discovered on the Internet Archive.
The Nashville-based trio is made up of Spencer Cullum, Sean Thompson, and Rich Ruth playing guitars, pedal steel, and a healthy dose of synthesizers. Though this group channels inherent ambient, post-rock, and spiritual jazz inclinations, Shrunken Elvis’s music sounds as if it should be playing through the tinny speakers of a mall or a 1990 furniture store in a forgotten area adjacent to the same mall.
This mix of the present and the past is best heard on the track “Marina Pt. 2”. There’s weightlessness to this music as the band attempts to reach for a kind of recycled air euphoria. The guitar riff itself is straight out of customer service hold music. The narcoticized bliss of “Marina Pt. 2” creates the right environment for calming irate customers and hopefully spurring the purchase of additional products.
Shrunken Elvis’s celebration of the ruins of capitalism felt in old malls connects to the concept of “Junkspace”, which was theorized by architectural critic Rem Koolhaas in a 2006 publication of the same name. More rant than theory, Koolhaas’s prose is a firehose of observations and descriptions of early 21st-century life that feel right at home within the Mall World and Backrooms setting.
According to Koolhaas, Junkspace is “what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.” He provides numerous details of what constitutes Junkspace, including “the cement planters behind the gas station; the sheltered wedge of sidewalk under the marquee of a retail bank; the farthest end of the airport departure lane, beyond the smoker’s corner: this is the spatial flotsam of the Anthropocene.”
Though Koolhaas intends for his writing to be a scathing critique, one can’t help but be intoxicated by the electric and outlandish nature of his prose describing Junkspace: “Product of the encounter between escalator and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock”; “the average contemporary lunch box is a microcosm of Junkspace”; “the professionalization of denaturing, a benign eco-fascism that positions a rare surviving Siberian tiger in a forest of slot machines, near Armani, amidst a twisted arboreal Baroque.”
Certain passages of Koolhaas’s writing seem to prefigure specific aspects of both Mall World and Backrooms: “Everywhere in Junkspace there are seating arrangements, ranges of modular chairs, even couches, as if the experience Junkspace offers its consumers is significantly more exhausting than any previous spatial sensation.” The limitless nature of these worlds is another connection point: “Because Junkspace is endless, it is never closed…. Renovation and restoration were procedures that took place in your absence; now you’re a witness, a reluctant participant.”
The music of Shrunken Elvis as well as that found on Tranquilizer fully aligns with Koolhaas’s Junkspace vision. Even the name Shrunken Elvis fits into Junkspace as the band’s music sounds nothing like Elvis Presley, but rather the image of a squashed, miniature-sized plastic Elvis figurine sold at a kiosk could be among Koolhaas’s many examples of Junkspace.
An appealing mixture of cultures can be felt within the limitless built environment of Junkspace. This can be heard in Shrunken Elvis’s song “An Old Outlet”. It contains traces of American, Asian, African, and European music fused together into a new cocktail, similar to the Junkspace street culture depicted in 1982’s Blade Runner. Indeed, “An Old Outlet” could be mistaken for the music that plays behind the commercial mantra repeated throughout the film: “A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!”
While Blade Runner’s vision for the future is ironic, the music of Shrunken Elvis weirdly carries a sense of optimism. The band has reclaimed a certain futuristic aspect of the sounds of the past. “An Old Outlet” remembers the faint rays of hope that used to be connected to a utopian tech future. While our current Junkspace society tells us otherwise, there are chances to dream and fantasize in Mall World, ferret out theories in the Backrooms, or revel in the music of Oneohtrix Point Never and Shrunken Elvis.
BASIC Ventures into Mall World and Backrooms Yet Unexplored
BASIC is also salvaging sounds from the Mall World / Backrooms era as a conceptual starting point for new explorations. The band draws inspiration and its name from the 1984 album Basic, created by guitar player Robert Quine and percussionist Fred Maher. Before writing and recording any music for BASIC, the band’s leader Chris Forsyth wrote a piece for Raven Sings the Blues praising the Quine / Maher album, describing it as sounding like “a warped ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ soundtrack, possibly played at the wrong speed.” With this description, we’re already in a Junkspace mindset. Yet Forsyth goes on to write that Basic “proves itself, like most great records, to both truly embody and transcend its era.”
This is BASIC, the band’s first album, isn’t a hands-tied-behind-back tribute album, but rather a deep immersion into a space in which sleek, futuristic guitar sounds paired with electronic beats and live percussion are the natural lingua franca. The music on This is BASIC doesn’t contain the wistfulness of Tranquilizer or the cool remove of Shrunken Elvis, but instead explodes as an exciting celebration of velocity and movement.
This is demonstrated best by the last track, “New Auspicious”, which turns every kid’s drawing of the fastest, most physics-defying rocket ship imaginable into song. However, instead of a pencil-on-paper drawing, this ship illustration could’ve been best depicted on BASIC, the early computer code that many kids learned in 1980s programming classes taught in office park rooms straight out of Backrooms.
BASIC released their second full-length LP in June 2026, and the music on this release has moved slightly away from the Quine/Maher starting point as if the band is venturing into new sections of Mall World or Backrooms heretofore unexplored. New elements on the album include moments of quiet contemplation, such as soaking in a warm pool of water, the raga-esque feel of “Index of Memories”, and even the appearance of an acoustic guitar on the pastoral “Premonition”.
The title of the album’s third track — “Loose Canon” — nods towards the breaking away from BASIC’s original inspiration. Despite this evolution, the song serves as a good representation of the reclamation feel of the entire band project as it could slide into Wang Chung’s To Live and Die in L.A. soundtrack without anyone noticing. Despite this connection, the track carries no whiff of nostalgia that can attach itself to a tribute band, but rather sounds fresh as it hurtles towards the future.
Some might hurl accusations of nostalgia towards Oneohtrix Point Never, Shrunken Elvis, and BASIC. How can this music be considered nostalgic when it is drawn from a forgotten culture of the past that many felt should have been left forgotten? It can even make the teeth of a certain person who lived through that time period grind involuntarily since the reclaimed music of Oneohtrix Point Never, Shrunken Elvis, and BASIC is attached to memories of the smell of hairspray, styles of clothing best left for dead, or of mind-numbingly bland television like Empty Nest, which somehow ran for seven entire seasons on NBC.
So much from this time period puts the junk into Junkspace, yet the music of Oneohtrix Point Never, Shrunken Elvis, and BASIC transcends. It opens a portal into a world that begs to be explored, like the dreamers who navigate Mall World or those who can’t resist the pull of Backrooms despite the potential horrors within. Time folds within this music: the future of the forgotten past is once again alive in the future.