Vivid visuals and glitches, unnaturally high vocals, and unexpectedly loud, ear-breaking bass are all components of hyper pop, a new microgenre with unique aesthetics and sound. And although the origins of such music appeared a long time ago, now it seems to be experiencing a renaissance with the emergence of a mass of new performers and the acquisition of a loud name that seems to gather hype around itself. keeping in mind that the boundaries of musical subgenres are always extremely blurred and conditional tells what hyper pop is where it came from, is it made in Russia, and does the future of pop music look like this.
The term hyper pop was popularized as recently as August 2019 with the official playlist on the streaming service Spotify. The playlist, the editing rights of which has already been transferred to the most famous representatives of the genre several times is still the main promotional tool for new hyper-pop musicians. One of its creators told Vice that the explosive popularity of 1000 gets, the first full-length album by the American duo 100 gets was released in 2019 as the motivation for creating a separate, new category of music. We thought it was a chance to start something new. We found several different names and terms for this kind of music but settled on hyper pop because it seemed the most comprehensive.
And the all-encompassing hyper pop really turned out to be the wildest tracks now fall into this category in which trap is combined with aggressive gabba and pop melodies are unexpectedly replaced by some kind of heavy rock and growl. Hyper pop is a melting pot of musical genres, preparing something at the same time blasphemous and incredibly sticky. Even though the hyper-pop label hides music completely diverse, the microgenre already has some distinctive features melodies, as a rule, are filled with sound distortions, the rhythm is torn the tempo changes radically, the vocals are autotuned and unnaturally high and the bass is set to maximum frequencies. In terms of sound hyper pop can combine genres that are completely distant from each other, from pop, Eurodance, trance, and K-pop to hip-hop, nu-metal, and grindcore.
The visual aesthetics are just as intense mostly bright, epileptic 3D paintings inspired by vaporwave early internet culture, and even memes. The frank sexuality inherent in many pop hits, as well as the kawaii aesthetics in hyper pop, are also cranked to the maximum sometimes to frankly frightening limits.f there is a thing that we all don’t like, it is a half measure. If you make something loud, then it must be the loudest you have ever heard. If you do something quiet, then it should be incredibly quiet. If you make it simple, then make it the simplest in the world. And if it’s something difficult, then it’s the most difficult thing in the history of music!
The very first compositions in which one can hear the origins of hyper pop (and which, if desired, would quite organically fit into this new category, if they came out now), appeared more than a decade ago, during the era of the peak of the popularity of autotune. For example, Pop The Glock by French-American singer Uffie, which was released in 2006, and its video released three years later, fall into this aesthetic, as well as the track of 2012 MTC by Australian DJ S3RL, which takes its roots from nightcore remixes. Canadian singer Grimes also released something similar; however, her recent releases, especially from the albums Art Angels and Miss Anthropocene, are much more hyperopic than her earlier works.
The most important role in the formation of the hyper-pop scene was played by PC Music – partly a label, partly an art group of like-minded people who released compositions so peculiar that listeners often singled them out into a separate genre which was nicknamed computer music. PC Music was founded by British musician Alexander Guy Cook (AG Cook) in 2013. Cook came up with an interesting ideology for the new association he decided to work with people who, in principle, had never done music.
The first artist released here was easy. I came to his house, turned on his computer, and was like, Go on this is great, maybe do this again, And he continued to motivate him. In the case of GFOTY, the songs turned into chaos. I just recorded her doing what she did and created the rest of the track around that stuff. Performers such as GFOTY, Danny L Harle, Kane west, Hannah Diamond, Namasenda, also Estonian rapper Tommy Cash, Scottish producer Sophie, bedroom pop star Clairo and Charli XCX herself. However, at first, the work of PC Music was perceived as a simple Internet banter, a postmodern imitation of pop music this was facilitated, in particular, by Cook’s QT project, within which he came up with a non-existent pop singer.
QT was the embodiment of Cook’s desire to create his own brand from scratch. In collaboration with music producer Sophie and American singer Hayden Francis Dunham, who gave QT the look, Cook released the Hey QT single and video promoting the non-existent (publicly available) energy drink DrinkQT. The single, which became the only release of the fictional artist, also organically falls under the definition of hyper pop – from the sound itself to the cloyingly artificial clip, as well as the surrealism of what is happening in general. According to the inscription on the bank of the power engineer 100 percent supernatural.
However, as conceived by the authors, it hardly looked like a mockery of the world of the commercialized pop industry. As Cook later admitted more than once, the members of PC Music actually love the music that is deconstructed and transformed. If there is anything that binds us, it is our attitude to the culture we do not divide it into low or high, we do not consider pop music to be some kind of shameful hobby. Our desire to experiment comes from an interest in music. The PC Music label, like most of the early artists who collaborated with it, did not receive much fame (however, based on the ideology of the association, it was hardly even a secondary goal for them). Only Cook and Sophie distinguished themselves, who became famous for their collaborations with real, heavyweight pop stars.
In 2016, the British singer Charli XCX, by that time already favored by both critics and pop fame, decided to step into a more experimental plane in her work – the hyper pop plane. In collaboration with Sophie, she released the album Vroom Vroom, in which melodic and familiar pop melodies were replaced by a sharp, ragged, avant-garde sound from a Scottish producer. After that, Charli XCX began to work closely with Cook and even appointed him as her creative director. The pop star’s label was horrified – what kind of music is this, they say !?
In collaboration with Cook, as well as dozens of other musicians and producers (Sophie and Dylan Brady of 100 gets worked on some of the tracks), Charli XCX has released two mixtapes (Number 1 Angel and Pop 2 of 2017) and two full-length albums (Charli 2019 th and How I’m Feeling Now 2020). The singer, in fact, turned out to be the main driver of this experimental hyper-pop music into the mainstream zone.
Cook and I are both very smart and equally dumb. And I think that’s very important in pop music. He makes a beat in a few minutes, I shout something to him, and even if it sounds crazy, we are not afraid to look stupid. We like to change formats and break the rules, Charli XCX told about working with Cook. Sophie, in addition to working on the music of Charli CXX, also took part in the recording of Madonna’s hit Bitch I’m Madonna in 2015 and collaborated with Lady Gaga on the Chromatica album (although her works did not make it into the final version, they will be released in an extended version). At the same time, Sophie herself, who released her solo studio album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides in 2018, also received a share of fame – the record was nominated for a Grammy music award, and the tracks from it were sold in commercials, including as the soundtrack for the Beyoncé Ivy Park commercial. It would seem that the path to the widest audience is already open for Sophie, but this was prevented by an accident – on January 30, 2021, it became known that the artist died in Athens.
It was reported that she died as a result of a fall from a height – Sophie wanted to climb higher to admire the full moon. She was 34 years old. Sophie has become, by far, the most interesting and visible artist from the PC Music group. Her music can also be summed up under the concept of hyper pop – in her releases, Sophie literally dissected pop music, making it sound either alien or unexpectedly soft. However, there is no better metaphor for this work than Sophie herself suggested, who compared her music to a three-minute ride on a roller coaster.
You are turned upside down, dipped in water, shone with a strobe in your face, slowly raised to the top, and then thrown vertically downward, sharply slowed down, and your hair is already disheveled, someone is sick, others are laughing, and then you go to buy a souvenir. This is how I see the potential of musicSophie’s boom in popularity has become a landmark moment not only in music, being one of the clear beacons of a shift in understanding the boundaries of social gender roles in the West. In 2017, Sophie (real name – Samuel Long) released a video for the song It’s Okay to Cry, in which she first showed the world that she is a trans woman.
Hyper pop within its current boundaries, in addition to all its musical and visual features, has another distinguishing feature – total inclusiveness, or even complete indifference to the well-established traditional concepts of sexuality and gender. After Sophie, a lot of artists from the LGBT community gained fame in this genre. One of them is a 28-year-old gender-fluid artist under the pseudonym, Dorian Electra, from the United States, whose hits and colorful absurdly ironic videos, in which labels that are offensive to the LGBT community are reappropriated, and the stereotypical image of masculinity and femininity is ridiculed by millions of views.
At the end of February 2021, a joint hyper-pop remix of Electra and singer Rebecca Black on the track Friday (the one that we showed at the very beginning of this material) appeared on the network – the original song, released in 2011, incredibly glorified the 13-year-old Black, and also formed a rather large group of haters around the young star, due to the pressure of which she subsequently stopped making music for a long time. The hyper-pop audience turned out to be much more tolerant – as one of the comments under the video says This is, of course, the strangest shit I’ve ever seen, but Rebecca Black, recording hyper pop with Dorian Electra in 2021, somehow looks too logical.
In addition to Dorian Electra, the American hyper-pop scene was filled with many performers such as SEBii, d0llywood1, midwest, glaive, Glitch Gum, dltzk, Quinn another pseudonym – p4rkr and up (under the latter name, by the way, the son of skater Tony Hawk is hiding). These young musicians (many of them are even underage) pushed the microgenre even wider, combining, for example, cloud rap with electronic music and pop motives moreover, in a similar aesthetics as the already thundering hyper-pop hits. They formed their own small online community, which was immensely contributed to by the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns, while many even managed to sign contracts with major labels and receive a lot of coverage in the Western press. What is really there, about them and a documentary was shot- however, their music is called digicore there. Although this crowd lives mainly on the SoundCloud portal, TikTok turned out to be one of the most important drivers of the popularity of their music the genre’s bright visual aesthetics and sticky music quickly won the love of the application users, who have already recorded hundreds of videos with hyper-pop tracks.
However, the fact that the press again started talking about the hyper pup and these Frankenstein experiments on pop is, of course, not TikTok, but 100 gets – an American duo consisting of producer Dylan Brady and trans woman Laura Les. 100 secs were formed in 2015, the first EP of the duo was released a year later and did not make much noise, but the tracks from the debut studio album 1000 gets, which appeared by the end of the 2010s, managed to get into a lot of materials from top profile publications that summed up the musical results of the decade – the release seemed so unconventional and fresh to the critics. However, at the dawn of popularity, 100 gets, like PC Music once, was immediately declared a postmodern joke and an ironic Internet duo like YouTube bloggers releasing parodies of popular compositions. Only here Brady and Les were absolutely sincere in their music – albeit, by their own admission, they had fun recording it. But since when has fun been tightly connected with irony?
1000 gets Brady and Les recorded remotely, and its roots lie in the DJ sets that the duo performed at virtual music festivals in the multiplayer game Minecraft in September 2018 and January 2019 (in the latter, by the way, such hyper pup also took part musicians like gupi, Iglooghost, um, AG Cook). In the wake of the release’s success, 100 gets recorded 1000 Gets and the Tree of Clues, a remix of their debut full-length album featuring tons of PC Music artists and star performers. Among them were the ubiquitous Charli CXX, Estonian musician Tommy Cash, Hannah Diamond, Kero Kero Bonito, Rico Nasty, Dorian Electra, GFOTY, and even Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stump. It was generally a shock. I thought he would never agree to this. A complete madman, Brady later shared his thoughts on collaboration with the latter.
If the music from 1000 gets disc already sounded like a crazy mix of rap, electronics, pop, and growl, then on the remix album 1000 Gets and the Tree of Clues Brady and Les brought the already difficult-to-describe melodies to a true, total absurdity … The visual accompaniment of the remixes to this madness perfectly matches – for example, in the video for the new version of the track hand crushed by a mallet from Fall Out Boy (the song, by the way, begins like a rock composition that has traveled in time from the beginning of the 2000s), a huge anthropomorphic fly agaric dances with a magical magnifying glass in his hand, after which he tries to catch up with a rat resembling the main character from the cartoon Ratatouille.
Despite the very small number of tracks released, 100 gets (who have not yet even decided how exactly the name of their duo is read – one hundred hex (hundred gets), one hundred hex (a hundred gets), or one zero hex ( one zero gets)) turned out to be incredibly popular – and, of course, they are not going to stop there. Considering how organically hyper pop (although we are talking here, of course, about the ability of Brady and Les to create this bewitching and daring game) can process music of other genres, it is no less natural on the new album 100 gets than collaborations with Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Guns ‘N Roses or My Chemical Romance (or all at once – on one track) and many, many other artists that the duo, by their own admission, yearns to get hold of and mix.
Hyper pop has already taken root in Russia – in addition to the fact that Brady from 100 gets and Dorian Electra recorded the track Toxic with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova from Pussy Riot (this composition is both homages to the famous hit Britney Spears and a song about toxic relationships) with a bloody video, Russian artists have already made similar music on their own. One such example was, for example, the February release of the band Zarya Power the music from this album is quite close to the western hyper-pop scene. Even earlier, something similar didUfa hip-hop artist i61 on the album ANGELWAVE, on which, by the way, in addition to the already “traditional” fit with rapper Boulevard Depo, there is also a joint with Pussy Riot. However, these releases hardly look as avant-garde as the compositions of their Western inspires. Established musical genres such as punk rock or techno music were formed naturally they arose in the work of groups of like-minded people in subcultures, and their formation sometimes took very long periods of time.
What was dubbed hyper pop develops a little differently avant-garde music with melodies falling under this category has existed for a long time, was created by different, often unfamiliar people, and after it was collected into one playlist and given a name under which you can fit a lot of different compositions. At the same time, according to 100 guests, the appearance of hyper pop for artists turned out to be really useful – the name for such a maximalist genre is certainly sonorous, and the hype around it helps to draw attention to completely new performers (by the way, the duo did this,
In the mid-2010s, a grandiose destiny was predicted for the PC Music label – the Western press already then described the work of young musicians as “the future of pop music. A few years later, it seemed that everyone had forgotten about too loud, chaotic, and not always melodic hyper pop – but by the end of the decade it turned out that this was not at all the case. PC Music’s unique aesthetic did not disappear without leaving a trace and to some extent paved the way for new forms of music. And if the pop of the future (and the question of will hyper pop become the future of pop” now also worries the Western press) will at least a little resemble the extreme experimental projects of Cook and Sophie or the music of 100 gets well, such a future looks a little brighter. Or at least much more interesting.
