Trap

Trap production and flows, the sound that has dominated Arabic rap since the second half of the 2010s.

Trap reached the region as a production template out of Atlanta and was rebuilt in Arabic and darija within a few years. The change was not gradual. Around 2018 and 2019 a run of Egyptian records took it from an internet niche to the most commercially dominant sound in Arabic rap, and Gulf, Moroccan and Levantine scenes followed on their own terms.

It is kept as its own archive rather than folded into Hip Hop for a practical reason: enough artists here work specifically in trap that the distinction is useful to a listener, and people search for it by name.

Expect 808s, triplet flows and a heavy debt to autotune, applied to dialects that carry it very differently from English. Many artists appear under both this term and Hip Hop.