20 Queer and Trans Music Artists You Should Be Listening To In 2026
For Pride 2026, we’re celebrating 20 queer and trans music artists shaping pop, rap, country, EDM, indie rock and everything in between.
Image Courtesy of Cain Culto & Hive Music | Shot by Davide Laffe
From bedroom pop and country noir to hyperpop, Latin trap and EDM, queer and trans music artists have built some of its most inventive musical genres.
For Pride Month 2026, we’re celebrating 20 queer and trans music artists we love, whose work makes room for desire, rage, softness, reinvention and full-body freedom. Some are global stars, some are cult favorites and some are still building the audience they deserve. Together, they remind us that queer music is, very often, the best thing on the playlist.
Pride Month 2026
20 Queer and Trans Music Artists We Love
01
Snow Tha Product
Snow Tha Product has built a career on speed, precision and complete refusal to sand herself down. The Mexican American rapper moves between English and Spanish like a weapon, bringing queer visibility into a space that has often demanded women be marketable before they are allowed to be complicated.
02
girl in red
girl in red turned bedroom pop into a queer shorthand, giving a generation of young listeners songs that made longing, awkwardness and sapphic desire feel ordinary in the best way. Her music lives in that tender place between crush and crisis, where the feeling is huge even when the production stays small.
03
Young Miko
Young Miko has become one of Latin music’s clearest examples of what happens when queer artists stop asking permission to take up space. The Puerto Rican rapper brings charm, swagger and softness into reggaeton and Latin trap, making her rise feel like a cultural correction and a party at the same time.
04
Ashnikko
Ashnikko makes pop music that feels like a glitter bomb thrown through a locked door. As a genderfluid and pansexual artist, they build worlds where rage, camp, sexuality and fantasy get to coexist without apologizing for being too much.
05
Doechii
Doechii is one of the rare artists who can make technical mastery feel chaotic, theatrical and deeply personal all at once. Her work moves through rap, performance art, comedy and confession, giving us an artist who treats identity as something alive, stylish and impossible to flatten.
06
DAMAG3
DAMAG3 makes music with teeth. As a trans, lesbian and genderfluid artist, they bring punk urgency into rap, using distortion, speed and fury to turn survival into sound. Their work feels built for anyone who has had to make a self out of everything the world tried to bury.
07
Cain Culto
Cain Culto’s music feels like queer gospel from the edge of the altar, pulling from ritual, folklore, politics and spectacle. As a gay Colombian American artist, he makes songs and visuals that turn religious rupture, desire and rebellion into something theatrical, sweaty and alive.
08
Shea Diamond
Shea Diamond sings with the force of someone who has had to fight to be heard and still chose joy, soul and radical self-possession. As a Black trans woman, her music carries the weight of survival while refusing to let pain be the only thing people see.
09
Arca
Arca makes music that sounds like the body glitching, transforming and refusing every category built to contain it. The Venezuelan artist’s work has helped expand the language of trans and nonbinary futurism in electronic music, turning mutation into beauty and instability into power.
10
Giolì & Assia
Giolì & Assia make electronic music that feels cinematic, intimate and sun-drenched, folding live instrumentation, vocals and DJ culture into performances that move like short films. As a queer couple and creative duo, their work carries the charge of collaboration as both art and love language.
11
MUNA
MUNA has become one of queer pop’s great emotional engines, making songs for the crush, the breakup, the dance floor and the long drive home after all three. With queer and nonbinary representation at the center of the band, their music gives heartbreak and joy the same level of respect.
12
Troye Sivan
Troye Sivan has grown from YouTube-era intimacy into full-scale queer pop spectacle, bringing desire, softness and club-floor euphoria into the mainstream without losing the vulnerability that made people feel close to him in the first place.
13
Perfume Genius
Perfume Genius, the project of Mike Hadreas, makes music that treats queer feeling as sacred, strange and physically overwhelming. His songs often sound delicate until they suddenly reveal their muscle, carrying grief, glamour, shame, lust and defiance in the same breath.
14
Omar Apollo
Omar Apollo makes heartbreak sound lush, bilingual and impossible to pin down. The Mexican American singer-songwriter moves through R&B, soul, pop and bedroom funk with a voice that can make vulnerability feel both devastating and casually cool.
15
Orville Peck
Orville Peck took the mythology of the cowboy and cracked it open for queer longing, loneliness and performance. Behind the mask is a country artist who understands that camp and sincerity can ride through the desert together.
16
Hayley Kiyoko
Hayley Kiyoko earned the “Lesbian Jesus” title by doing something pop music still made feel rare when she broke through: centering girls loving girls without coyness, tragedy or translation. Her videos helped turn sapphic pop into a visible language for fans who had been starving for it.
17
Ezra Furman
Ezra Furman writes like someone chasing holiness through distortion, tenderness and panic. As a trans woman singer-songwriter, she makes rock music for outcasts, believers, runaways and anyone who has ever felt their body become both a question and a map.
18
Lucas Silveira / The Cliks
Lucas Silveira helped make history as the first openly trans man signed to a major label record deal, fronting The Cliks with grit, charisma and a rock voice that carried far beyond the novelty the industry tried to attach to him.
19
Changeline
Changeline makes hyperpop and queer punk feel like a transmission from a cracked-open nervous system. The French trans artist’s work is loud, messy, emotional and electric, turning dysphoria, fury and digital-age alienation into songs that refuse to behave.
20
Dua Saleh
Dua Saleh’s music moves between rap, R&B, poetry and experimental pop with a fluidity that matches their presence as a Sudanese American trans and nonbinary artist. Their songs often feel intimate and haunted, while carrying a political charge.
