---
title: "BookTok’s growl meme gets a bass drop: how ‘smutstep’ went viral"
description: "A dubstep producer turned romance novels’ ‘he growled’ dialogue tag into a genre, and the backlash into an audience"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-13T16:35:23Z
modified: 2026-10-14T02:13:20Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/booktok-s-growl-meme-gets-a-bass-drop-how-smutstep-went-vira-0947dc
language: en
tags: ["music", "ai", "books", "internet", "fantasy", "culture"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# BookTok’s growl meme gets a bass drop: how ‘smutstep’ went viral

*A dubstep producer turned romance novels’ ‘he growled’ dialogue tag into a genre, and the backlash into an audience*

By Luis Goa · October 13, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/booktok-s-growl-meme-gets-a-bass-drop-how-smutstep-went-vira-0947dc

## In brief

- A Nashville musician performing as DARQ DAGR created “smutstep,” dubstep with growled romance-novel dialogue
- Romantasy fiction generated $610 million in US revenue in 2024, per Bloomberg/Circana figures reported by the Globe and Mail
- Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm sold 2.7 million US copies in its first week in January 2025, a 20-year BookScan record
- DARQ DAGR credits voice actor Michael Ayok with originating the underlying “BookTok growl” trend before him
- A viral repost of his clip drew roughly a million views on X, most replies hostile; he limits Instagram comments to followers

Smutstep is dubstep with a voice actor growling romance-novel dialogue over the drop — the point in a dubstep track where a tension-building buildup resolves into a sparser, heavily distorted bass pattern, conventionally around 140 beats per minute with the snare landing on the third beat of the bar rather than the second and fourth, which is what gives the genre its lurching, half-time feel, per the genre’s [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubstep). The genre’s inventor, a Nashville-based musician and voice actor who performs as DARQ DAGR and goes by James, did not set out to build it. It arrived through a specific feedback loop: viewers kept commenting requests for him to growl specific romance-novel lines, he kept obliging, and at some point a commenter typed the word “smutstep” under one of the clips. The name stuck before the genre had a second example, as he told [404 Media](https://404media.co/smutstep-dubstep-booktok-growl-darq-dagr/).

The raw material is BookTok, the books corner of TikTok, and specifically romantasy — fantasy novels with graphic sex scenes, built around series like Rebecca Yarros’s *Fourth Wing* trilogy and Sarah J. Maas’s *A Court of Thorns and Roses*. The genre generated $610 million in US revenue in 2024, Bloomberg reported in figures carried by the [Globe and Mail](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/books/article-romantasy-booktok-publishing-trends-2026/); US romance overall sold 51 million print copies in the twelve months to June 2025, up 24% on the year before, according to Circana BookScan data cited in the same piece. Circana’s figure is a rate, not a prior-year total, so the baseline year’s unit count was not published alongside it.

The combined hashtags #FourthWing and #RebeccaYarros have logged more than a billion views on TikTok, [*Time* reported](https://time.com/6332608/iron-flame-rebecca-yarros/), and the third book in that series, *Onyx Storm*, sold 2.7 million US print copies in its first week in January 2025 — the fastest opening week for an adult title in the 20-year history of BookScan, which tracks US point-of-sale book data, according to [publishing analyst Jane Friedman](https://janefriedman.com/onyx-storm-by-rebecca-yarros-fastest-selling-adult-title-in-history-of-bookscan/). The previous record, Colleen Hoover’s *It Starts With Us*, sold 810,000 copies in its opening week in 2022 — a third of *Onyx Storm*’s number, and a gap wide enough that BookScan’s own framing called the newer book’s run unmatched in two decades of its data.

![A pink book with speaker cones and a bat wing sits atop stacked books, sending teal sound waves toward a pink heart.](https://rews.cc/img/c75843961df64cdadf5916a3081f8641a68d8ee4.webp)

## Who growled first

The vocal bit predates the music. James did not invent the “BookTok growl” — a delivery style, borrowed from romance novels’ habit of tagging dialogue with “he growled,” that voice actors on TikTok perform over clips of themselves. He told 404 Media that another creator, Michael Ayok, who posts as @michaeleok, was doing it first; Ayok has since stitched James’s own “original sound” clips on TikTok’s platform, a feature that attributes audio back to whoever first uploaded it, which is part of why credit disputes in this corner of the internet are traceable rather than just argued about. A third voice actor, James Jericho, also built a following on the same bit; a video of Ayok and Jericho growling at each other is itself one of the format’s more-watched artifacts. James’s own addition was to set the growl to a dubstep drop, after a commenter asked him to growl the line “sit down.”

James’s account of his own background is a trained-vocalist résumé, not a meme-account one: eight years touring internationally in a country band, plus prior work in metal, theatre, pop and rock, before he left the band and started posting dubstep content that was true to what he actually listened to. His wife is the one who brought him into BookTok’s orbit. The first video that went viral for him, he said, was not a growl but a correction — a complaint that “a lot of these BookTok boys” were performing the growl wrong, followed by his own version pulled from his metal background.

**How outrage feeds the genre** The loop from a reposted clip to more smutstep demand

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Romantasy dialogue tags *("he growled")* | BookTok growl trend *(Ayok, James Jericho, others)* | source material |
| BookTok growl trend *(Ayok, James Jericho, others)* | Smutstep *(growl + dubstep drop)* | added drop |
| Smutstep *(growl + dubstep drop)* | Clip reposted off-platform *(e.g. to X)* | crosses platforms |
| Clip reposted off-platform *(e.g. to X)* | Hostile replies | outrage replies |
| Hostile replies | More reach, more requests | engagement signal |
| More reach, more requests | Smutstep *(growl + dubstep drop)* | comment-section requests |

![How outrage feeds the genre. The loop from a reposted clip to more smutstep demand](https://rews.cc/img/889913f3e609c1a799f675d74a1bfe5ca04168da.webp)

Based on [404 Media interview with DARQ DAGR](https://404media.co/smutstep-dubstep-booktok-growl-darq-dagr/)

That loop is visible in how the clip that broke smutstep out of its niche actually moved: a TikTok or Instagram Reel of James growling lines over a dubstep beat got reposted on X by someone unconnected to him, captioned as the funniest thing they’d ever watched. The replies underneath were mostly contempt — “actually the worst thing I have ever heard,” “who the FUCK is demanding this” — and the repost still racked up roughly a million views. James said Instagram is where the hostility concentrates hardest; he has limited his comments there to followers only, while leaving them open on TikTok and Facebook, which he described as comparatively civil. He was candid that the volume of contempt still has a cost: “of course it does mentally take a big toll on you,” he said, even while framing the hate as fuel rather than a reason to stop.

> I think that’s effective art. You want people to be moved to an extreme. But you cannot control what that extreme is gonna be.

![A silhouetted singer leans toward a microphone as pink speech bubbles converge from the left and large teal and navy sound waves arc outward.](https://rews.cc/img/e6cdca3a53ecccc81f15cb6fa8c8e0482238e041.webp)

James drew a line between his own project and the kind of provocation that invites that comparison: he brought up Marilyn Manson unprompted, arguing Manson’s shock value was built to carry social commentary, a mirror held up to the audience, whereas smutstep carries none. “It’s not meant to be taken as seriously as so many of the haters take it,” he said. That is a claim about intent, not effect — a track doesn’t stop generating outrage, or algorithmic reach, because its author disclaims meaning. He compared the growl itself to KISS’s makeup: a recognizable hook that differentiates a performer in a market, not a statement.

What has not yet happened is the genre acquiring a second well-known name. A year after the first growl videos and roughly a year into “smutstep” having a name, the format still runs through one creator plus the handful of growl-trend originators he credits; there is no indication yet of streaming-platform genre tagging, a Spotify playlist category, or a second producer independently building a catalogue under the label, the way “brostep” eventually accumulated artists beyond Skrillex. Whether smutstep becomes a genre with more than one working producer, or stays a bit that belongs to whoever is willing to read the comments, is the next thing to check — not this quarter’s view count, which neither platform nor creator has published.