Rich Kidz’s bright melodies and boy band vibe. Yung L.A.’s slurred whisper-sing and questionable mohawk. Young Dro’s country club fashion and way of describing his whips and jewelry with the clarity of a picture book: “Chevy look like Almond Joy,” “Wrist pinker than Miss Piggy.” Travis Porter’s easy-t0-memorize turn up anthems. J Money’s vision of the future where he fought UFO-flying martians from stealing his swag. Bubbly, digitized synths and sputtering trap drums. DJ tags and button-mashing sound effects out of the ass. It was Atlanta’s futuristic era, a generation of flashy goofball rappers who peaked in the late 2000s and early 2010s and made their days of cars, clothes, girls, strip clubs, drugs, and crime sound like a fantasy that took place at shopping malls on the moon.

Truthfully, a lot of the mixtapes were hit-or-miss studio session dumps with half-assed themes. (I’ve come around to Young Dro’s skits on Black Boy Swag, White Boy Tags where he sounds like he’s doing a Bill & Ted impression.) And you really had to comb through to find the gems, but they were more about the upbeat mood, the lingo (Kwony Cash used “peons” like it was the kind of insult you could never recover from), and music that hit better at a party where everyone knew the words. Earlier this year, I met up with SahBabii in Brooklyn for an interview for this column, and, for most of our conversation, he was friendly yet stoic and tight. His mood shifted, though, when we spoke about Atlanta’s futuristic era, and suddenly he sank comfortably into his chair and had a twinkle in his eye. The memories that flooded back to him had more to do with the communal energy than individual songs: “If you were there, you could just feel it. I was at Metro Skates. I was on Cleveland Ave. I went to Sylvan Hills Middle School and Booker T. Washington High School. I miss those times. It was free. Nobody anywhere else was doing it like that. In Atlanta, all the kids were making music together.”

But don’t get it twisted: the songs themselves still kick it all off. Proof: Pluto and YKNiece’s “Whim Whamiee,” one of the biggest and most inescapable viral rap hits of the year, feels like it’s bringing that feel-good era of Atlanta rap back. Is it because the beat is a flip of Gutta and OJ da Juiceman’s Zaytoven-produced “Wham Bam”? Not really; that original track is meaner and muddier than a lot of the futuristic stuff, even if Zaytoven’s funk sparkles like sunlight reflecting off the ocean. Instead, it’s really due to how silly, sloppy, and organic Pluto and YKNiece’s connection seems to be, like they just happened to be together one night with plenty of bottles and stumbled into a recording booth. The background noise, full of muffled singing along and way too loud ad-libs, makes the whole thing sound like it was done in one wild-ass take.

Sure, I’m drawn to the nostalgia of it all, but “Whim Whamiee” is good as hell because it’s more about them being the realest, coolest girls in Atlanta. A timeless message. Their raunchy verses are fun and catchy, too. Every YKNiece bar and ad-lib could be its own catchphrase—“Hit the door, ho!” and “I’m talkin’ ’bout innit!” already are. She’s the better of the two, with the kind of voice you might hear over the loudspeaker at the DMV first thing in the morning: unhurried and full of attitude. Her lines linger in the air long after she says them like the scent of burgers on the grill. Pluto is the energy, with a voice that screeches like burning rubber. She makes everyday Atlanta activities like riding the MARTA with her girls and throwing on an outfit to hit the streets sound larger than life. She’s got some great lines, too, most importably when she repurposes white suburban fashion into the flyest shit: “He want me bad, heard he a duck, can’t get no coochie out the queen, put some Lulu on this butt (Lululemon).” Young Dro is somewhere smiling like a dad whose kid just hit a walk-off double.

It’s too bad that since “Whim Whamiee” blew up a few months ago, Pluto and YKNiece have gone their separate ways, now describing each other as “business partners.” That doesn’t ruin the song—though I prefer to imagine good rap duos as being damn-near in love like Thug and Quan in 2014—but they need each other because everything else they’ve put out so far is forgettable. A few weeks ago, Pluto dropped her debut album, Both Ways, a tonally confused project caught between Atlanta drill and lighter tracks about wearing expensive clothes and running up the credit cards of tricks. As for YKNiece, I’ll reserve my judgment for her eventual debut tape, but “Yams,” her new wannabe twerk anthem with Bhad Bhabie, might as well be a Sexyy Red song made by A.I., and the BunnaB team-up “Innit,” which spins off her ad-lib on “Whim Whamiee” into its own song, seems to exist for no other reason than to go viral.

But the futuristic revival isn’t dead on arrival, because, speaking of BunnaB, her recent solo mixtape Bunna Summa (Ice Cream Summer Deluxe) captures the frothy yet cranked up spirit even more than “Whim Whamiee.” It’s not groundbreaking, but it doesn’t have to be. She has the sticky bubblegum hooks (“Mad Again”) and a decent selection of computerized summertime beats (“It’s Me”) to go along with a buzzy hit in “Bunna Summa” that makes getting drunk on an Atlanta street corner in True Religion jeans sound like the true American dream. (It probably is.) Jacking old Gucci and Rich Kidz flows, she lays the nostalgia on a little thick, but I don’t mind because she’s funny and has an imagination. For example, “Staddy,” a sort of unofficial coming-out anthem, is kind of nuts, as she balances the fears of dating men around the way with a fantasy of what life would be like if she was smashing “studs” instead. “I like this girl, she like me/Was holding it so long most people didn’t agree/Can use the same bathroom when we gotta’ pee,” she sing-raps, dragging out the final syllable of each line like how Rich Kidz do their hook on “Wassup.” It’s a good time.

And Atlanta rap could use a spirit boost. For a while, it’s been hard to write about the scene without death or jail coming to mind. Rich Homie Quan. Takeoff. Young Scooter. Rico Wade. Lil Keed. The YSL trial. Just when the dark cloud shifts, it comes right back again. That could be why the nods to the bright synths and fantasy of the futuristic era of Atlanta are hitting so hard at the moment, whether that be Carti’s Rich Kidz–sampling “Like Weezy” or BunnaB’s filthy taunts on what sound like Nard & B type beats. It’s a lighter return to the city’s swaggy moment of 15 years ago, music to just rap along to with your friends until the summer ends, where not much matters other than copping a fresh Ralph Lauren rugby or Lululemon matching set.