Blackwinterwells

Rodney Winter was born on July 5, 1996, in Hamilton, Ontario.^[1] He^[a] grew up listening to new wave music his parents played, such as the band Tears for Fears.^[4] Winter was impressed by dubstep producers such as Skrillex in the early 2010s.^[5] At age 14, while playing the video game World of Warcraft, another player in his dungeon told him about the genre.^[4] After, he discovered and downloaded FL Studio. Winter produced dubstep music for a few years and gained a small audience.^[6] He initially released music as Drainpuppet on SoundCloud before using the name Blackwinterwells.^[7] He later shifted to producing future bass and dance music with a sad atmosphere. Inspired by Lil Peep and Bladee, he began producing cloud rap around 2018.^[5] He founded the musical collective Helix Tears in the genre that year.^[8] Winter had previously not felt confident recording vocals, but after Lil Peep died, he felt an urgency to practice more. According to Dazed, he considered Lil Peep a "reason for being".^[9] By 2019, Winter had 400 followers on SoundCloud.^[4]

Winter eventually became involved in the hyperpop scene, a community of musicians creating loud and energetic pop music, and found many close friends.^[5] His association with the scene solidified in 2020 when he produced the song "Bad Idea" for Quinn.^[10] Both were in the same Discord server consisting of around 50 young musicians. During a video call in February, he sent a glitchy beat with harsh synths to her, and she quickly recorded vocals about a recent argument she had on Twitter.^[11] Winter was so excited by the song, which received 10,000 plays on SoundCloud in a few days, that he had trouble sleeping.^[9] "Bad Idea" was placed on Spotify's "Hyperpop" playlist and received over one million streams on the platform by November.^[11] Winter's 2020 song "Iris" became his most streamed on Spotify, though he was also known for his production work for hyperpop musicians such as Glaive, D0llywood1, Midwxst, and 8485.^[12] In June, Glaive was scouted by a talent manager who heard his song "Sick", produced by Winter.^[13]

Winter's output as Blackwinterwells greatly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he retired the moniker Drainpuppet to pursue new interests. He released his first two albums in 2020: Seraph in April and Stone Ocean in October.^[7] Each track of Stone Ocean has one or two features from glitchcore musicians in Helix Tears, which had become associated with hyperpop.^[14] Teodor Zetko of Exclaim! enjoyed the production and worldbuilding of certain tracks. He praised Winter for publicizing and embracing the musicians in the scene and thought D0llywood1's feature on the first and last tracks represented a "cyber-circle of life."^[15]

As of 2021, Winter was a member of the hyperpop collective Bloodhounds and producer collective Garden Avenue.^[16] Alternative Press was excited about Helix Tears, describing its members as glitchcore and HexD transcendentalists.^[17] Winter released many singles that year.^[7] Among them, "Omen" was later analyzed in Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ).^[18] He also began a real-life friendship with 8485, co-producing four of five songs on her extended play (EP) Plague Town.^[19] Winter released the EP Sulfur in March 2022. His next album Crystal Shards, released in April by Eyeball Records, was written over two years and features Helix Tears members D0llywood1, Bella Lugxsi, Saturn, and Emotionals.^[20] In the summer, he toured North America with 8485 and Fish Narc.^[21] Winter released the album Protector in December, and Xtra Magazine included his single "Gnarlethorne", released by Bitbird, in their year-end list of favourite queer songs.^[22] In November 2023, Winter performed as a supporting act in Paris and London during the Pitchfork Music Festival.^[23] That month, The Fader invited him to record a cover of "An Honest Mistake" by the Bravery for a compilation album supporting transgender charities.^[24]

In a 2021 interview, Winter was adamant that his music is emo rap. Others had disagreed, but he thought he only modifies the genre by adding synths. He welcomed being associated with hyperpop but thought it was misplaced. The critic Eli Enis thought that Helix Tears becoming associated with the genre shows that the descriptor is very broad.^[5] Compared to other hyperpop musicians, Winter's music is more downtempo and ambient. Trey Taylor of The Face cited this as one competing definition of the genre.^[4] Shoegaze, hip-hop, and alt-pop are also influences in his music.^[25] More recently, it has been described as leaving hyperpop.^[26]

In FL Studio, Winter builds songs around synths, usually using subtractive synthesis, whose settings he changes to create a patch. He thought his peers had more complicated patches or expensive workflows.^[5] Jessica Canjemanaden of Dazed said that Winter sends stems, beats, loops, and verses to friends through the Internet.^[9] Older and more experienced with Internet music scenes than his peers, Winter supported them with sound engineering. Becky Stephenson of New Noise Magazine thought he was "content with a life in the background", citing his Bandcamp description: "sad ghost".^[7]

Winter wrote lyrics for "Iris" quickly. After many attempts, he decided on a beat with a saw synth melody, a saw bass, and basic drums. An arpeggiator played simultaneously in reverse, both chopped, created a back-and-forth sound. Inspired by Skrillex's experimental outros, he used a vocal chop to make "weird chromatic piano bullshit at the end".^[5] Zetko described Stone Ocean as an "idiosyncratic world" and the result of a positive outlook and having fun.^[15]

"Omen" features phantasmagoric lyrics and a looped sample of "Bad Idea". The vocals, in parallel octaves, are autotuned, breathy, and fried. In the music video, greyscale shots repeat of Winter in a dark staircase, below a radio tower, and watching a snowy suburban neighbourhood from a car. Later, a bedsheet ghost is shown in a forest and grave. Westley Montgomery in TSQ thought the ghost was a metaphor for "spectral remnants of the suburban Global North". He said the ghost and fluid vocals refused a fixed subjectification required by society to enforce gender roles.^[27] Crystal Shards uses imagery of medical procedures and fragile human bodies to describe painful and collapsing relationships. Stephenson thought his earlier work often described fantasy worlds, and so the album was lyrically new.^[7] "Gnarlethorne" has breathy singing and lyrics that switch between storytelling and emotional honestly. The song builds to a dubstep drop characterized by a break.^[28]