With flkms, 404 Shay Writes Five Lowercase Letters on the Road to SAFE
With flkms, 404 Shay Writes Five Lowercase Letters on the Road to SAFE
A Canadian Digicore Artist Releases the Second Single From an Upcoming Album Called SAFE
The title is the first thing to notice: flkms, five lowercase letters and not a vowel among them. 404 Shay, an artist from Toronto, Canada, released it on 18 September 2026. It is the second single from an upcoming album called SAFE. The styling places it in digicore, the internet-born scene where lowercase names and titles are part of the look.
404 Shay’s flkms is in the playlist below, next to the alt-pop and dark pop this desk follows, and the 404 Shay profile collects the other articles. It came to AltPop.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Play it first, then read on for the scene behind the lowercase.
Digicore Grew Out of a Discord Server and a SoundCloud Playlist, and flkms Comes From That Line
That scene has a short, well-documented history. In 2018 a Minecraft and Discord server called Loser’s Club became a meeting point for young artists. Quinn, Glaive, Ericdoa and Midwxst were among them. By late 2019 the artist lonelee had coined the name digicore. It replaced draincore, the earlier label taken from Bladee, the Swedish rapper, and his Drain Gang collective. Then, in 2021, a SoundCloud playlist of the same name spread it further.
The sound grew from trap, emo rap, nightcore and cloud rap. Heavy autotune, layered melodies, high and breathy vocals and sing-rapping are its markers. Still, Bladee remains the central reference, especially for the scene’s use of autotune.
404 Shay tags flkms as digicore, and the catalogue around it moves through the same family. Apple Music files the earlier singles under pop, alternative, hip-hop and singer-songwriter at different points. That is what a scene built on crossover looks like from the outside.
Where 404 Shay Fits, From Carry On in 2024 to LITTLE GIRL and flkms on the Road to SAFE
The run of singles on Apple Music starts with Carry On in October 2024. nostalgia, back&forth, geometry and mother wounds followed through 2025. Then Love closed that year, released alongside sped-up and slowed versions, the alternate speeds that short-video listeners expect. In 2026 came WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF, duller, doesn’t quite fit and Flaws & Scars.
Read the titles in order and the styling shows a choice rather than a habit. Most are lowercase, while WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF and LITTLE GIRL, released on 7 August 2026, shout in capitals. LITTLE GIRL was the first song presented under SAFE, with a music video on YouTube that the artist edited personally. flkms is the second. The artist introduced SAFE as the result of years spent making music from things that could not be said out loud. The same posts frame safety as no longer needing to hide who you are.
404 Shay, credited as Shayla Denise Landriault, wrote flkms and sings it. Ethan Ashby made the beat, engineered the session and mastered the track, and Dante Barrios mixed it. The single runs to 2 minutes 51 seconds. Before release, a teaser for it carried the caption in gross beat we trust, a nod to the FL Studio effect producers use to chop, stutter and slow a sound. One of the first posts for the single set its lyrics against images from the film Coraline. That kind of edit is common currency in the scene.
404 Shay, Glaive and the Lowercase Generation
The closest neighbour is Glaive, styled in lowercase like so many of the Loser’s Club names. Glaive posted songs to SoundCloud at the start of the pandemic and built a following. A deal with Interscope followed, and the debut EP Cypress Grove came out in 2020. But 404 Shay is taking the other road: fully self-released, with posts that put community ahead of streaming numbers. The same posts point listeners toward Never Stayed Dead, a community the artist is building around the music.
So who is it for? Listeners who came up on digicore’s Discord-era names. Fans of alt-pop that wears its production on its sleeve. And anyone waiting for SAFE. Start with LITTLE GIRL, then play flkms, and the album’s shape starts to show in lowercase and capitals alike.
AltPop.News’s curator team: “We added flkms to our Alt-Pop, Alternative Pop, Dark Pop playlist. At 2 minutes 51 seconds it says what it needs to and leaves. That suits a single whose job is to point toward a bigger project.”
Stream flkms on Spotify and Apple Music. Follow 404 Shay on Spotify, Apple Music and Instagram, and find LITTLE GIRL on every platform through its Hypeddit page.
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