ilysm talks internet music and ‘burger world piece & the endless mediocrity’

Coming off five releases in 2025, ilysm, an Edmonton-based internet rap project by Meryl Buhler, played a set with a full band at Winterruption 2026. Ahead of their set at the festival, Buhler chatted with The Gateway about internet music and their newest full length release.

With her first release coming out in 2020, Buhler said that when she was getting started, she saw a gap in the local scene and decided to fill it. “I just kinda make music for the internet. That’s my [motivation],” she said. “When I started, there wasn’t a lot of internet focused hip hop shit.”

Internet music, as its name would suggest, is a niche internet based genre that is self-aware, ironic, and often up-beat. It is also known to try and push the barrier of what digital production can do. “I kind of just want to capture the sound of the internet itself, just chaos and noise. Like, the most we can do. I feel like a lot of music doesn’t play to everything we can do, and I try to push that kind of sound forward,” Buhler explained. 

Buhler agreed that internet music has a very hardware aesthetic and sound. And she said that she likes to juxtapose that with nature aesthetics and sounds. “A lot of the music videos were just shot outside in the trees and stuff. But all the music was noisy, weird hip hop.” She said her release that encompasses this the most is her 2022 album, no matter how i look at it ... 

“I’ve always wanted to be out of the box with it,” Buhler says 

Like the contrasting visual aesthetic, merging different subgenres and trying to make new blends of sounds is a big thing on Buhler’s radar. “Every record would have a really diverse array of sounds. If I was doing a hyper pop song, I’d have a boom bap cut in the back.”

In her newest album, burger world piece & the endless mediocrity, she incorporates jazz and boom bap. “I’ve always wanted to be out of the box with it,” she said. “It was always in the back of my mind, that when I have the ability to get in the studio and have a band, I want to do a rock song, some jazz, bosa nova, we’ll just see what happens.” 

This new release also allowed for more thematic experimentation for Buhler. “Most of my songs are pop songs to me, just saying what the beat says, having fun. But, [this new release] was kind of my playground to do a lot more and be a lot more down to earth with it,” she explained. “A lot of that record is just talking to the audience about what I’m going through. And that was a new thing for me. But I had a lot of fun making it.” 

The change to making more emotionally influenced music wasn’t easy for Buhler. “It was probably the toughest record for me to work on,” she said. Buhler originally had the idea for the record two or three years ago. But throughout the years, she had a hard time writing something she was happy with. “I would come up with something on the piano, and a couple weeks later I’d be like ‘no, it’s not personal enough. It just doesn’t strike the right chords,’” she explained. 

“It’s just what felt right to express those feelings I was feeling,” Buhler says

By the time she was wrapping up the project, she listened through all the tracks and felt differently. And by then, the project became a bit of a look into the past. “I was just listening through everything I had done for the project overall, and I went ‘all of this is good.’ And so the final project became the culmination of all these ideas from all these different points in time,” she said.

Despite the difficulties at times, the process overall was a cathartic way to get things out. “[The project] was completely like, I need to just get these thoughts off my mind. And I didn’t care if people thought it was too vague or didn’t totally resonate with them. Even down to the way I structured the record,” Buhler explained. The record has a lot of genre switches throughout that she said didn’t make sense to some listeners, but it made sense to Buhler. “It’s just what felt right to express those feelings I was feeling. If I’m the only person that gets it, that’s fine by me.”

If you do get it though, she’s happy with that too. “It’s mainly about being a shut in, and coping with the fact that you’ve been shut in, and now you don’t have all the same opportunities anymore. And [the record is] also for the people that went through these similar things in their life. If people find solace in it, I’m happy,” she said.