Into The Music
Hyperpop started as a provocation and became a genre by accident, which is appropriate for a sound built on accidents being turned up too loud.
The origin story runs through PC Music, the UK art collective and label founded by A.G. Cook in 2013. The early releases from Cook, SOPHIE, GFOTY, and Hannah Diamond were pitched at a frequency that made critics uncomfortable in ways they couldn’t always explain. The sound was pop processed until it was somehow both more and less than pop: brighter, faster, more synthetic, more emotional in a way that was also more artificial. The vocals were processed into something almost cartoonish. The bass was wrong in ways that were clearly intentional. The whole thing felt like someone had extracted the pure essence of a commercial jingle and then run it through a machine that had no concept of restraint.
SOPHIE was the key. Not just because she was extraordinarily gifted, which she was, but because she understood that the exaggeration was the point, not the failure. Her 2018 debut album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides took the maximalism of the PC Music aesthetic and gave it emotional weight, specifically the weight of identity: queer identity, trans identity, the question of what it means to live in a body that the world keeps insisting should be different. SOPHIE made the synthetic feel personal. She made the unnatural feel like the most natural thing possible. Her death in January 2021 was a loss that the genre has not finished processing.
The term “hyperpop” itself was generated by Spotify’s algorithm, which is either the most fitting origin for a genre name or the least fitting, depending on your relationship to algorithmic culture. It stuck because it described something real: a cluster of artists, primarily on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, primarily young, primarily queer, primarily uninterested in making music that was comfortable to listen to, who shared an aesthetic DNA even when they were making wildly different sounds. 100 gecs, Charli XCX (in her more adventurous moments), Arca, Dorian Electra, Kim Petras in her earliest phase: all orbiting the same planet, some of them deliberately, some of them not.
Charli XCX is the artist who dragged the most explicitly hyperpop-adjacent sound into the mainstream, though she’d resist the genre label when it suited her. Brat, released in 2024, won Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 2025 Grammys and became a genuine cultural moment in a way that most music doesn’t. It was hyperpop’s calling card to the mainstream, and the mainstream took it without fully understanding what it was agreeing to.
The sound in 2026 is more diffuse than it was at the height of the SoundCloud era, which is what happens to every genre that gets absorbed into the broader conversation. You hear the influence in places that would have seemed implausible five years ago: in pop production choices, in the way AI-generated vocal effects are being used by artists who have never heard of A.G. Cook, in the general acceptance that digital artificiality is not a problem to be fixed but a texture to be worked with. PC Music shut down new releases in 2023, moving to archival work only, which felt like the end of something and probably was.
But the thing about hyperpop is that it was never really about the label. It was about a set of questions: What counts as real? What counts as authentic? Can something be emotionally genuine and sonically synthetic at the same time? SOPHIE’s career was a decade-long argument that the answer to that last question is yes, absolutely, and the argument holds. The genre built around those questions will mutate and dissolve and re-emerge in forms that nobody has named yet. That’s fine. That’s what it was always going to do.
“Started as a provocation” , okay, but so did a lot of things that got taken seriously once the right people were involved. The article’s honest that hyperpop basically became a genre by accident, which is fine, but it also means the gatekeeping around it was always artificial. Meanwhile regional Mexican music has had genre evolution happening organically for a century and still gets treated like a niche interest. I’ll engage with hyperpop when the music press engages with the full map.
The “genre by accident” origin story is actually a smart commercial outcome even if nobody planned it that way. PC Music and the SOPHIE-adjacent stuff created a sonic fingerprint distinct enough that labels could market against it, which is half the battle. The fact that it was built on distortion and maximalism made it easy to license for certain contexts too. Accidental genres often have cleaner commercial DNA than the ones that came with a manifesto.