Gabber
Gabber is a Dutch style of hardcore techno with a distorted, heavy kick drum and fast tempos of roughly 140 to 190 beats per minute.
It came out of Rotterdam in the early 1990s and became a large youth subculture in the Netherlands, with shaved heads, tracksuits and a fast dance called hakken. The word is Amsterdam slang for 'mate' or 'friend'. The music is built on a distorted kick drum, with dark themes and samples taken from films and other tracks. It is the best-known early branch of the wider style now called hardcore.
Artists it is known for: Neophyte, Rotterdam Terror Corps, Paul Elstak.
- Family
- Electronic & Dance
- On Spotify
- A current genre
- What it is
- A genre
- From
- Rotterdam, early 1990s
- Also called
- gabba
- Trackify listeners who play it
- 2%
About 1,300 of 83,000 Trackify listeners with public profiles have gabber among their top artists of the last four weeks. Rounded; updated 13 November 2026.
Gabber artists
Joost
Goreshit
Sickmode
Vieze Asbak
Lil Texas
Brutalismus 3000
Lekkerfaces
Yoshiko
MCR-T
Dimitri KThe gabber artists most Trackify listeners have in their top fifty. Each opens on Spotify.
Sources
The definition is written for this site from open sources, and was checked against them on 13 November 2026.