Into The Music
There was never a clean origin point. Hyperpop arrived less like a genre announcement and more like a gradual recognition that several overlapping experiments were pointing at the same thing. PC Music in London was making deliberately artificial pop that treated glossiness as aesthetic philosophy. SOPHIE was producing music so strange and physically intense it seemed to be testing what the human body could process as pleasure. 100 gecs was making songs that felt like falling down stairs while a sugar rush peaked. And then the internet noticed, labeled it, and compressed all of it into a single word.
The word was imprecise, which is appropriate. Hyperpop was never a genre with firm borders. It was more of a tendency, a willingness to take the elements of popular music and push them past the point where they are supposed to stay. The bass too low. The pitch correction too obvious. The tempo shifts too sudden. The references too layered, too knowing, too fast to follow on a first listen. If mainstream pop asks you to be comfortable, hyperpop asked you to be slightly overwhelmed and see if you liked it.
A fan-led archive project launched earlier this week is collecting everything SOPHIE ever performed or released, building a comprehensive record of a career that ended too soon when she died in 2021. The project, WHOLENEW.WORLD, is assembling live sets, discography information, photoshoots, and interviews. It is not affiliated with her estate or former labels. It is just people who believe the work matters and want it to be findable. That kind of preservation effort speaks to how seriously SOPHIE’s output is being taken, not as a curiosity or a footnote to a genre conversation but as a body of work significant enough to document carefully.
Which raises the question of where hyperpop sits now, five years after its moment of peak mainstream attention. The short answer is everywhere and nowhere. The influence has spread so thoroughly into pop production that it no longer marks a subculture in the same way. Pitch manipulation, maximalist layering, the willingness to use distortion and breakbeats in pop contexts: these are now available moves for any producer. Charli XCX’s mainstream recognition and Grammy success brought the aesthetic to audiences that would never have searched out the PC Music back catalog. The specificity of the label has faded even as the sound it described became ubiquitous.
What remains is a generation of artists who were formed by that period and are now making music that reflects it without necessarily being described by it. The producers and artists who came up through SoundCloud and Bandcamp in the early 2020s, who were listening to SOPHIE and 100 gecs and A.G. Cook during their formative years, are now the ones making pop music that feels restless, referential, and uninterested in smoothing out its own edges. The genre label may have become imprecise, but the aesthetic sensibility it pointed at is still very much alive.
The WHOLENEW.WORLD project is documentation, yes. But it is also an argument. An argument that the artists who came before this current moment were doing something worth understanding, that the origins of where we are now were not accidental, that someone thought carefully about what pop could be when you stopped being afraid of what it was allowed to do. That argument is worth making. SOPHIE made it first.
Hyperpop wasn’t a phase, it was a pressure test. Grime went through the same thing in the 2000s, people kept saying it was a moment, then suddenly it’s everywhere. Overlapping experiments is exactly how it works.
Dom, I hear you on the grime comparison but I’d be careful with that parallel. Grime had community infrastructure, pirate radio, specific postal codes, a whole network holding it up before it crossed over. Hyperpop was largely a SoundCloud and Twitter phenomenon, which is a different kind of pressure test. Whether that difference matters for longevity, I genuinely don’t know. But I don’t think the roads to mainstream are the same.
What’s interesting structurally is how hyperpop treated distortion and pitch-shifting not as effects but as primary tonal material, the way Ligeti used micropolyphony. The ‘overlapping experiments’ framing in the excerpt is accurate, these weren’t parallel developments so much as a shared harmonic logic being discovered from multiple directions simultaneously.
Cassandra yes!! This is exactly why I get so frustrated when people write hyperpop off as ironic or throwaway. The pitch manipulation, the distortion as melody, that is technically demanding and emotionally intentional. You don’t accidentally make something that hits that hard in the chest. Whether it came from academic theory or from a teenager with a laptop doesn’t matter, the result is the result.
My uncle used to say that the genres that last are the ones that nobody can fully explain while they’re happening. He said the same about early punk, about acid house, about the moment in the mid-70s when rock started fracturing into all those micro-scenes nobody had names for yet. Hyperpop fits that pattern perfectly. Not a genre, not a movement, more like a temperature change that nobody noticed until they were already sweating.
What strikes me about the framing here is the phrase ‘gradual recognition,’ because that is how oral traditions work too. In Igbo storytelling, a new form does not announce itself, it accumulates until listeners realize they have been inside it all along. Hyperpop did something similar, these overlapping experiments that nobody named while they were happening, and then suddenly the name existed and everything snapped into focus retroactively. What it left behind is maybe less important than the question of what absorbed it, because nothing disappears, it just gets folded into the next thing that also refuses to announce itself.
Hyperpop is basically overproduction as religion. i get it intellectually but man, give me a blown-out four-track recording any day.