Remember how cool you thought you were in high school driving around with that secondhand subwoofer in the trunk of your brother's Toyota Camry?

Yeah well, meet the sound systems that eat your old sound system for a midnight snack:

On a muggy August evening on Randalls Island, I stood in a field of Honda Odysseys and CR-Vs, tricked out with towering rows of tweeters and subwoofers. Speakers were affixed to the roofs or lined the trunks of the vehicles like light artillery, painted in canary yellows, blood reds and indigo blues.

This is Dominican car audio culture, notorious in New York. It is often parodied on TikTok, capturing the tragicomedy of living in this city. "Me trying to fall asleep in NYC," a caption will typically read, as pounding bass bludgeons an unsuspecting sleeper out of bed.

If you live in certain parts of New York, this is all too familiar. It is the sound of bachata, dembow and merengue típico infiltrating every city crevice on the weekends until the cops try to shut the music down, and an after-hours game of cat and mouse commences. It is a secret world of pleasure and protest, made blaringly public.

Some more shots of these incredibly frightening machines:

As if you needed another reason to consider never moving to New York, "You won't sleep because the neighborhood kids blare Aventura at 120 dB late at night" is definitely a powerful motivator!