There's a growing trend online and in popular media of nostalgia for the 1990s and early 2000s, evidenced recently by the successful A24 film Backrooms set in a 1990s version of California and the viral Instagram trend asking "what were you like in the 90s?"
That increasing wistfulness for an era spent surfing the early internet andshopping at local malls inspired Miami artist Sam Berler to embrace a genre he calls "mallcore" that's netted him a steadily growing online following.
Berler, who uses his last name as his artist title, is a music producer whose style mixes dark hip-hop, emo and trap.
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"Nostalgia I've always kinda gravitated towards, and the whole 'mallcore' aesthetic really came from back in the day, like the early 2000s with Hot Topic and Zumiez and stuff like that and the music. Just all that culture combining together," the artist told WLRN in an interview.
Berler's content capitalizes on the longing among young millennials and older Gen Z for free days at the mall and a more rudimentary online environment with websites like MySpace and Tumblr being the main social media platforms. He's inspired by visual themes like Seapunk, sometimes referred to as Frutiger Aero.
" It's basically like an aquatic, underground kind of a niche with a lot of 3D rendered graphics, almost like a '90s, mid-2000s aesthetic where it's just like ocean, water, palm trees shiny orbs and dolphins," he said.
Berler got his start in music as a teen, mixing beats on his mom’s computer. He made a band called Oxytocin Dreams with his friend and fellow Miami artist Skrrp!, and ended up working with popular underground artists like "$uicideboy$," a rap group with an average of 10 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
"This was, like, super early in the SoundCloud days, and $uicideboy$ ended up reaching out to us. And yeah, we ended up producing a couple songs for them. One of them was called Noxygen," Berler said.
As an artist, Berler was finding moderate success, but it wasn’t until a joke video he posted on Instagram late last year that his following started growing quickly. In the video, he claimed to be the new owner of Sunset Place: an outdoor mall in South Miami slated for demolition. He captioned the video saying he would save the mall and reopen stores.
Berler created a satiric persona as the new owner of Sunset Place, and more people were sharing and engaging with Berler’s videos about the mall than anything he had posted before, so he leaned into it.
He started making more content at Sunset place and other malls inspired by Chicago-based rapper Adam Kelly, who goes by ADamn Killa. Kelly posts purposely silly videos interacting with people out in public, asking viewers to share the post and promote his newest music. He has an Instagram following of 1.7 million people, and has played at the popular Rolling Loud concert in Orlando.
Berler's videos featured him appearing at different shopping centers like The Falls or Southland Mall in southern Miami-Dade County, and telling audiences to send the video they want to take to the mall and then playing his latest single to increase exposure.
"I'm definitely inspired by ADamn. A lot of people in my comments, they'll say, 'You're copying ADamn Killa," but really me and Adam have a song together. If you go back and listen, it's called 'Dividends' by Berler, A Damn Killa, and Bomber," Berler said.
Berler’s content gained popularity in part for the comedy, but also because it tapped into a shared feeling among Miami and South Florida natives: a nostalgia for shared spaces that are disappearing, and a feeling of wanting to keep those places around.
In 2026 alone, more than a dozen beloved cultural institutions in Miami and Fort Lauderdale have closed down, including the Wynwood watering hole Gramps Bar that served as a hub for independent and underground local artists to play their music live.
"I have a passion for Miami and where I'm from, and there are a lot of these places that don't get the love they deserve," Berler said. "I feel like a lot of people just see Miami as, you know, Brickell, Wynwood or South Beach. At least the people that aren't from here. So it's cool to give the world a different look at Miami."
He’s grown in popularity at Dolphin Mall, a shopping center in the city of Sweetwater that’s been an inspiration for one of his latest and most popular singles: "Dolphin Gang."
The song has been used on reels seen by thousands of people on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and has led to Berler being recognized in public by people wanting to sing "Dolphin Gang" with him. He's hosted meetups at Dolphin Mall where dozens of fans have joined together to create videos.
Berler recently published a new EP titled “Mallcore” on the tenth anniversary of his first music release. The album featuring singles named after South Florida malls and hangout spots including Miami's Design District and Dadeland Mall in Kendall.
