Into The Music
Hyperpop arrived around 2019 as a joke and an argument simultaneously. The joke: what if we turned everything to 11 and then found 12? The argument: the pop music mainstream was so sanitized, so algorithmically optimized for frictionlessness, that the only honest response was maximum artificiality pushed to the point of absurdism. Pitch the vocals until they shatter. Make the bass drops land like car crashes. Let the 808s breathe and choke in the same bar.
A.G. Cook’s PC Music label in the UK had been developing the aesthetic since around 2013 – hyper-produced, deliberately synthetic, self-aware about its own confectionery qualities in a way that made the sweetness feel like commentary rather than product. When that sensibility collided with American artists like 100 gecs (Dylan Brady and Laura Les), and the Spotify playlist algorithm introduced it to a generation of bedroom producers and listeners who were looking for something that felt actually weird, hyperpop exploded.
The defining characteristic isn’t the pitch-shifted vocals or the maximalist production, though those are the surface markers. It’s the genre’s relationship to sincerity and irony – they’re not opposites in hyperpop, they coexist. 100 gecs’ “money machine” sounds like a Korn track filtered through a blender and it also kind of is genuinely emotionally affecting, and that paradox is the entire aesthetic program of the genre made explicit.
100 gecs’ Dylan Brady releasing a new solo EP this week – alongside news of a Yeat and Kylie Jenner collaboration – is a reminder that the genre has bifurcated: one branch went mainstream (the viral TikTok end), and another branch went deeper underground, becoming more experimental and less interested in accessibility. Both lines are valid. The mainstream end brought a new generation to electronic music. The underground end is producing genuinely adventurous work.
Entry points: 100 gecs’ self-titled debut, charli xcx’s how i’m feeling now (quarantine-era hyperpop that holds up as one of the decade’s best pop records), and Dorian Electra’s My Agenda. If you want the UK origin, A.G. Cook’s solo record Apple is where the whole project started revealing its emotional core.
What I find most compelling about hyperpop’s trajectory and this piece captures it well is how it mirrors something much older: the tradition in many West African musical forms of using exaggeration, distortion, and excess not as noise but as critique. In mbalax, the tama drum patterns can become almost comedically dense, layers folding over layers, and that density is doing something philosophical it’s questioning the very idea of musical order. Hyperpop’s ‘artificiality as aesthetic program’ lands differently for me through that lens. It’s not deconstruction for its own sake; it’s a genre asking what was real about pop to begin with. And surviving with that question open is more interesting than any answer would have been.
Amara, the way you connect hyperpop’s exaggeration to older musical traditions is really landing for me. I’ve been sitting with this article and noticing how the sheer maximalism of hyperpop , the pitch-shifted vocals, the overloaded production , almost bypasses the nervous system’s defenses. It’s like something too large to armor against. My meditation teacher would say that’s how breakthrough happens. Whether it’s intended or not, that’s real.
okay I only knew hyperpop from like a couple 100 gecs songs my friend sent me and I thought it was a joke?? but this article is making me realize there’s actually something real happening with the emotion underneath all the distortion. gonna go down a rabbit hole this weekend. does anyone have like a starter playlist because I feel like I’ve been missing something
I appreciate the argument being made here about emotional honesty, but I’ll push back slightly on the idea that artificiality-as-aesthetic is a novel move. Sparks were doing something formally quite similar in the early 70s , maximum surface gloss concealing genuine pathos , and synth-pop ran that same play for a decade. The difference with hyperpop is the degree of compression and distortion, which at certain bitrates and through certain playback systems frankly sounds like audio damage to me. That said, I’ve been wrong about movements before. I once dismissed Prefab Sprout and had to spend years quietly walking that back.
Marcus’s Sparks point is worth taking seriously , and the streaming data actually supports the ‘artificiality as long tradition’ argument in an interesting way. When hyperpop blew up on Spotify around 2020-2021, the playlist behavior was striking: listeners who engaged with it had some of the highest skip rates in the first 15 seconds BUT some of the highest replay rates for tracks they didn’t skip. Which suggests it’s a deliberately polarizing aesthetic that self-selects its audience aggressively. That’s not a failure mode, that’s a feature. Sparks did the same thing with a different distribution system.
Hyperpop was basically grime on helium for a minute there and nobody wanted to say it. The maximalism, the aggression, the deliberate ugliness used as energy , that’s not new, that’s just a different postcode. Respect the lineage.
I’ll admit I don’t fully get hyperpop but I’m also aware that I said the same thing about a lot of music in the 90s that I now consider essential, so I’m trying to hold the skepticism loosely. What I will say is that ’emotionally honest’ is a phrase that got applied to grunge so many times it lost all meaning, and I’m a little worried the same thing happens here. Authenticity is easy to claim. It’s harder to prove. Show me what this music sounds like in ten years and then let’s talk about what it was honest about.