banger

A banger is a song so good and so energetic that you want to play it loud, on repeat. By extension, anything excellent can be a banger: a tweet, a meme, even a meal.

What banger means

Merriam-Webster’s slang sense is an energetic song that is very striking or extraordinary. It’s a step up from just liking a track. A banger is the song that makes the party, the one everyone screams along to. “Back-to-back bangers” is high praise for an album or a DJ set.

Online, people stretch it to anything that hits: a perfect tweet is a banger, and so is a really good post.

Examples

• “This album is banger after banger.”
• “That song came on at the wedding and the whole room lost it. Absolute banger.”
• “Your tweet about the group project is a banger.”

Banger in British English

In the UK, banger has older everyday meanings that have nothing to do with music. Merriam-Webster lists three British senses: a sausage (as in bangers and mash), a firecracker, and a beat-up old car. One popular explanation, repeated by Wiktionary, is that cheap sausages had so much water in them they could burst with a bang in the pan. Merriam-Webster dates the word to 1915.

So “bangers at the party” can mean very different things depending on who’s talking.

Related terms

• Bop: a catchy song (but read that entry first).
• Slaps: is really good, usually music.
• Fire: excellent.
• Turnt: hyped up, like a crowd during a banger.

See more terms like this in our Gen Z slang guide.