In June 2020, Dylan Brady and Laura Les, the musicians behind the chaotic duo 100 gecs, were interviewed in Paper magazine by Skrillex, a similarly polarizing figure who had shifted the balance of power in electronic music a decade earlier. As they traded stories, Brady and Les were gracious and deferential to their host, acknowledging him as a massive influence on their sound and approach. But there was a point of divergence: Skrillex, a key figure in bringing dubstep to massive festival audiences, had found himself at home in the spotlight, even if that wasn't always the plan. "It's never the thing you're just trying to premeditate that is going to be the biggest thing," he mused. "What connects to people naturally is your most natural, real essence. That could be stretched out in 15 years, it could be Avatar and you're f***ing James Cameron taking that long to make it. But it's still his pure vision. I think more than ever in critical moments, what are people going to care about? It's bigger than music, you know?" At that, Les politely countered: "Don't want to be bigger than music," she said. "Definitely just want to be music."
"Being music," in the all-encompassing sense, seems to be the aspiration of the genre 100 gecs has come to represent: hyperpop. Since the 2010s, that name has been a controversial catch-all for a blown-out music of excess and kitsch, unafraid of the abjectly cybernated or "lowbrow," seeking the sound of the dissociated online self. In recent years, the genre has spawned subgenres like glitchcore and digicore — terms often used interchangeably, only furthering confusion about what any of these words actually mean — and split into factions that in turn have bucked media narratives about what belongs where. But Les' statement may be the key to understanding the underlying value that has held true in hyperpop through all its variations: The most important thing is what's being made, not who is making it.
Hyperpop as a sound has no single origin point, but as the buzzword we know today, it began with a playlist. Spotify curator and "data alchemist" Glenn McDonald, hoping to define the aesthetic of all the eclectic, pop-leaning speedrunners practicing what he called an "ebullient electro-maximalism," published his list in 2019. In a way it was an internet dragnet: The company may have cemented the use of name, but its curation of the space wasn't particularly refined, and the selection of music within had a frustrating lack of parameters (even scrolling through its current incarnation feels disorienting). You could argue that "pop music" proper is just as nebulous a term, but at the very least it has a commercial function as the bin for blockbuster albums and Top 40 songs. By contrast, hyperpop as defined by Spotify seemed to begin and end with the platform's own programming logic, which has always been less about accuracy and more about vibe. It's far from the only playlist designed as a genre functionary, but orgánica, metropolis and vanguard have not taken hold in the same way — perhaps because they represent ideas that already existed, particular strains of house and indie and alt-R&B. It's fair to guess that "hyperpop" became so widely adopted because it was gesturing at something enticingly unformed, a new and real phenomenon waiting to be qualified.
For most listeners, that something begins with PC Music, the U.K. record label from which McDonald drew the most inspiration, which writers and critics had dubbed "hyper-pop" in the early days of its rise. Almost as soon as its first tracks emerged on SoundCloud in 2013, there were questions about how to define this curious new cyberculture-obsessed entity, which drew on electronic music, pop music and club recreations like "bubblegum bass," and initially stoked as much cynicism as excitement. Songs like cartoonishly pitch-shifted "Hey QT," and the it-girl R&D of its consumerist music video, defied "good taste." PC Music's releases laid the foundation for a genre proficient in reading the rooms of the post-irony web, even as the time-lapse acceleration of the internet mutated the sounds faster than tastemakers could document them. Most can agree that the late British musician SOPHIE, a transformational electronic artist and PC Music affiliate, was a progenitor of the form, and yet many of its subsequent stars sound unrecognizable next to Product, her 2015 collection of breakthrough singles. By the end of the 2010s, as 100 gecs' chintzy starburst "Money Machine" sounded a clarion call for artists with similarly garbled taste, the genre seemed to split into three primary strains: glitched-out post-hardcore (such as brakence's "prozac"), muffled, bass-boosted bops (quinn's "i don't want that many friends in the first place") or zippy, chiptuned synth-pop (dollywood1's "Ihonestlymightjustgiveup"). The music has hopped along the rings of that Venn diagram in the years since, producing a myriad of configurations that came to feel endless.
Regardless of what it was pulling or from where, the thing that could be said for sure about much of hyperpop's first decade was that it was overactive — at once picky and omnivorous, fiber-optic and too much. It facetiously embraced pop songcraft from the world over while shrugging at its industry. Many of the creators were queer or trans, warping their voices and treating the shadow web as a hidey-hole. They bonded playing games like Minecraft; boredom became an impetus for exploration and collaboration. Their DIY ethic was found collectively, in public spaces that felt intimate and private, and that welcomed the fusing of niche and popular interests.
That generality led naturally to friction, with many disputing the term and some artists, like the freewheeling emo-pop groaner glaive, rejecting it outright. Hyperpop was called the future of music one year and declared dead the next, in part because of the confusion surrounding what, exactly, it was. Much of the contention sprang from a predictable place, the abiding distrust that musicians hold for any label that might reductively box them in. But there were also those who gravitated toward the word, seeing it as a callsign. The artist ericdoa, who came to hyperpop from rap, has described it as akin to an inclusive creative hermitage for restless web surfers seeking community. And in a story about the genre for The New York Times, Laura Les said she had come around on hyperpop as a tag because of its hyperlinked flexibility.
Most music is, in one way or another, on the internet — but not all music is of the internet. Even with streaming services hosting the work and social media setting the terms of how artists engage fans, pop typically bends toward daylight, yearning to be heard in the real world of streets and clubs and gatherings, to become bigger than music. In contrast, hyperpop seems to aim for the gaps between. It has no interest in the zeitgeist and only a glancing one in the real world, opting instead for digital life as an amalgamation of all musical things past and future.
In an early interview, PC Music founder A.G. Cook explained his intent to treat amateurs like major-label artists from a process standpoint: "The label's called PC Music, which alludes to how the computer is a really crucial tool, not just for making electronic music but for making amateur music that is also potentially very slick, where the difference between bedroom and professional studio production can be very ambiguous." Hyperpop has shed much of that initial slickness across its many iterations — the sonic distance between Danny L Harle's "Super Natural" and 100 gecs' "stupid horse," released barely three years apart, is immense — but the focus is still on the computer, as a link from the bedroom to a surreal pop wonderland made strictly in the images of virtual avatars.
If hyperpop has ever truly lived anywhere it is Discord, one of the last social platforms to feel like the old internet of chat rooms and forums. On its fan-made "servers," group chats assembled around shared niches of interest, the music and its fandom have so flourished that the company highlighted the 100 gecs server as a case study in community building on the platform. Elsewhere, artist collectives like PlanetZero and NoHeart formed on servers like "Balls Official Music Group," which became a testing ground for new iterations of the sound — and a sanctuary for the main characters in what would become the hyperpop offshoot digicore.
Digicore is often conflated with its parent genre, but as a name it's fairly intuitive. As teenagers at the turn of the 2020s, artists such as quinn and kmoe linked on the servers to play video games online before eventually shifting into music creation and collaboration, and the layering of those wired-in sensations pulses through all digicore music. Still, its fans have often gone out of their way to make the boundaries clear. In 2021, discussing her work running SoundCloud's official digicore playlist, curator Billie Bugara defined the budding microgenre by what it wasn't: "not Hyperpop and not Glitchcore." The young artists on the scene similarly resisted hyperpop's taxonomic grasp. "None of us make straight up 'pop' music at all," d0llywood1 told Bugara in an interview for i-D. "We're all digital kids who met each other on the internet and so make music that sounds like s*** we found on the internet."
While the kids making it seemed to have a pretty good grasp of what was going on in their commune, outsiders struggled. "midwxst combines hyperpop and digicore elements with hip-hop, topping his sound with candid lyrics," reads an industry tip sheet's 2023 description of the rising rapper and singer. The explanation isn't precisely wrong, but fans will tell you it feels off somehow. It might be more accurate to say that hyperpop and digicore have a nesting doll relationship, and that rap is not a mixer for their heady brew but the Everclear in a jungle juice concoction. Listen to midwxst and you'll hear XXXTentacion and emo rap as clear precursors, as well as the rambling pop-punk trap of Juice WRLD. The internet is forever, so there are also shades of MySpace-era microgenres like crunkcore, and, lately, some integration with the rage music of Playboi Carti and Yeat. Digicore is hyperpop, but hyperpop isn't necessarily digicore. The post-100 gecs iterations of this music have assimilated rap as they have everything else, particularly mining the SoundCloud era of the 2010s, which is obviously foundational for many born in the 2000s.
Jane Remover, a 21-year-old from New Jersey who joined the Discord servers as a fan and gamer and quickly became a practitioner, is one such artist. No musician better embodies the ideals and potential of digicore, or hyperpop more broadly, nor has advanced as much alongside all that these styles have come to comprise. Teen Week, the 2021 EP that Jane released under the since-retired alias dltkzk, is a seminal project for the genre, key to understanding its sonic and aesthetic principles. It isn't just auto-tuned, glitchy music evoking a sentient, malfunctioning DDR machine — it is also distinctly anarchic, even by hyperpop standards. It flits from mutated Cascada-like Eurodance to leveled-up drum 'n' bass to twinkling, alien mumble-pop, as if Yung Lean tried to remake "Fireflies" from memory, and displays the acute understanding of genre necessary to hotwire those familiar pathways, hijack their torque and suspension and build out supercharged Twisted Metal contraptions.
After the self-diagnosed "doom rock" of their 2023 album Census Designated and the emo segue of their alias Venturing, Jane Remover returns to digicore on this month's Revengeseekerz, and in so doing makes a seismic case for the music as more than ephemeral. "Frenzied" doesn't quite do it justice: It is rage music turned inside out, detonating the overdriven trap subgenre so that it fragments to reveal warped clips of everything else. The album, sketched while the artist was on tour with JPEGMAFIA, is more rap-focused than anything they have made before, drawing a line between hyperpop and hip-hop that is often overlooked or erased — and yet it would be reductive to call it a rap album. There is simply too much crammed into its 50 minutes — the Jedi-level Beat Saber heroics of "TURN UP OR DIE," the overheating arpeggios and synth meltdown of "Fadeoutz," the dial-up drums of "Professional Vengeance" — and its sonic cues establish a server all its own. The extensive sound effects reel includes Pokemon battle announcers on Wii, the anime feature The End of Evangelion, a Guitar Hero iOS game, dialogue from Duke Nukem, a PBS series and the witchy 1996 film The Craft. In addition to its deep sound repository, the album is tactfully self-referential: Several songs sample old Jane Remover tracks, side projects and production work for other artists from the digicore moment. In more ways than one, it feels like the final stop along digicore's evolutionary process.
Revengeseekerz shares its release date with the latest album from 2hollis, an artist who is, emphatically, not digicore. The singer, rapper and producer (who is also the son of Tortoise drummer John Herndon) denounced the label in song in 2022, saying, "I just don't like it / And I don't like when people say my s*** is it." It's easy to see why listeners might have made a surface-level connection: 2hollis' primary influences are the rappers of Swedish cloud rap collective Drain Gang, who have fringe connections with digicore's sounds, and he toured with rager Ken Carson, a flagship artist of Playboi Carti's Opium label. That said, his music isn't nearly as pixelated or whimsical, tending to have a more orderly composition even at its most loose and eccentric. He'd probably reject hyperpop as a signifier too: If that genre's definitive signature is hyperactivity, his is a far less scatterbrained approach. On his crashing, digi-fied 2023 album 2, or in or warp-speed tunes like "trauma" and "gold," the guiding force is more restless energy than pure overstimulation.
On the new star, 2hollis' best album yet, he leans into techno, imagining his trance-like pop as a tireless pursuit of stardom. The roving, highly kinetic songs reflect the agitation he is working through within them, grappling with the double-edged sword of emerging fame. "Everybody I don't know tryna know me these days, I don't even know who I am," he whispers on "tell me," as a glimmering, Simon-like synth progression circles restlessly beneath him. All of the same components from Revengeseekerz are at work here as well, just laid out in sequence rather than funneled through a single point. "destroy me" is straight-on, chugging and infectious; it locks you into its groove and nails its subtle mid-song shift like a DJ transition. The distortion here is minimal; there are songs that could easily be floor-fillers with the right audience. The subversive quality of this wonkily constructed music is just how well it can masquerade as traditional pop, manifesting the A.G. Cook principle of bedroom recordings that pass as hyper-professional.
It feels instructive to look at Jane Remover and 2hollis as mirrors of one another, two artists with common forebears who took away opposite lessons — Jane adopting extremity, 2hollis sleekness. But as polarized as their approaches seem, there are still overlaps to be found. Both are swept up in managing their microcelebrity, pulling at the same genres as they search for a definitive portrait of who they are as artists. A desire not to be classified is clearly top of mind for both: "Could feel them putting me on a shelf through the phone / Not face of s*** except the music I own," Jane sings on "Twice Removed." Put them side by side and you can see what makes the music within the hyperpop orbit so hard to classify. But you can also hear all of the things that made it feel so singular in the first place.
Last year, the writer Kieran Press-Reynolds, one of the most dutiful and thoughtful documenters of hyperpop, lamented that in spite of all its potential as a transformative force, it hadn't endured in the way its champions predicted. "The 'pop' in hyperpop proved a total bust," he wrote in a Pitchfork feature. "The charts are smothered instead in country, trap that sounds stuck in the 2010s, and soft, zamboni-smooth pop." It was a fair assessment, one seemingly made in the wake of beaming COVID-era proclamations from hopefuls like Bugura, who wrote: "The future of pop music is not defined by major labels, access to top recording studios, or even a consistent sound to call its own. Instead, it's called digicore, and it's shaped by the world of Discord servers, Minecraft, and the type of musical intuition that could only have been nurtured through years spent consuming YouTube beat tutorials and a cracked copy of FL Studio." In retrospect, I think both set the bar for hyperpop's success in the wrong place. The music was the future of pop, just not in the chart-conquering sense. It rewired the very dimensions of what "pop" music can sound like without ever compromising its community values. As Press-Reynolds acknowledged, the influence is everywhere; that's a win in itself.
Genre is far more useful when you're listening to or thinking about music than when you're making it. Some of the tension felt in this space can be explained by those misaligned priorities, where artists are seeking chaos and listeners are seeking something to latch onto. The hallmarks of the movement — collaborating in virtual communities, challenging gender binaries, memeing their music into oblivion — always suggested a little in-group relishing its outsider ways, one with no real desire to become card-carrying members of a pop establishment. The sounds were too abrasive for the uninitiated, the "pop" always more about volatility than popularity. And everything burns out faster in the digital age; of course that would include the life cycle for some of the most internet-pilled music ever made. But even if the moment is gone and the "scene" is dead, both star and Revengeseekerz prove the network will never truly go dark.
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