Expect pop producers to begin incorporating elements of trap, or trap step, into their tracks in 2013. Just Blaze’s recent collaboration with trap visionary Baauer presages this. Once pop adopts trap, as it adopted dubstep and basically every underground music movement in America or Europe since black ragtime, something will have to fill the gap. And what will that post-trap genre sound like, exactly?

One candidate is melodic form of trap currently being peddled by artists like CID RIM, Cashmere Cat, and Jaw Jam. It has the 808s and drops of typical trap, but is not as minimalist-repetitive. Songs like CID RIM’s “Six Hundred” and Cashmere Cat’s remix of BenZel’s “Fallin Love” (below) follow jazz progressions to racing percussion lines redolent of DnB. It’s like danceable James Blake.

RL Grime tweeted this one last week:

These artists’ debt to trap is similar to the debt owed by chillstep producers to dubstep. In both cases musicians took the pulsing, primal club roar and domesticated it for leisurely afternoon listening. But there are two important differences. The tracks above are laid back only in temperature. And they aren’t merely trap cooled, they’re trap complicated. It’s similar to how prog-rock bands of the 1970s like Yes! and Gentle Giant infused Led Zeppelin’s grittiness with jazz elements.

What to call the new style? Melodic + electronic = melonic? Music that reminds you of melons? Anyway, names aren’t important. Point is, this stuff could be the next thing, or it could be a bridge to the next thing. We’ll see.