The Brash, Exuberant Sounds of Hyperpop

In 2014, music fans and critics began paying close attention to a mysterious group of artists who’d started releasing tracks online. They were part of PC Music, a loose electronic-music collective that functioned more like a conceptual-art project. Led by a young, inventive producer from London named A. G. Cook, PC Music, and its affiliates, rejected a dark, murky strain of underground electronic music that was beloved at the time. Instead, they latched onto the most exuberant and absurd elements of pop, making cutesy, theatrical songs that sounded a bit like children’s music, but with an unsettling aftertaste. If mainstream pop is designed to make people feel as if they’re on common ground with all of humanity, this music made listeners feel like they were in on a very specific joke. In a Pitchfork article titled “PC Music’s Twisted Electronic Pop: A User’s Manual,” one critic wrote, “The shadowy operation and its bewildering brand of hyper-pop have been everywhere in the past few months . . . and its influence seems to be growing on a daily basis.”

That term, “hyper-pop,” was such an intuitively accurate way to describe this scene that it eventually became a catchall for the many subgenres, artists, and micro-communities that the PC Music movement helped give rise to. More recently, the experimental duo 100 gecs has honed a delirious, cleverly referential sort of hyperpop. Like PC Music, they confound the corporate centers of the music industry: their songs have drawn fervent fans, but the group is too brash and novel to be easily boxed into any preëxisting musical categories. Still, playlists are the bread and butter of streaming services, and they live and die by legible taxonomies. So in 2019, to address the quandary of 100 gecs’ unlikely popularity and unwieldy style, Spotify launched a new playlist designed to give their sound a home on the platform. It was called “hyperpop.”

Today, the hyperpop playlist serves many functions: it is a corporate branding exercise, a track list with an obsessive listener base, a constantly evolving document of a vital corner of music’s digital underground, and an object of resentment among some of the artists it promotes. The micro-genre has become influential enough that Apple Music now has its own version of the hyperpop playlist, called “Glitch.” Earlier this year, SoundCloud—the D.I.Y. streaming service where many hyperpop artists uploaded their earliest songs—published a short film about the scene, which it called “digicore.” Incoherence is inherent to the genre, and the songs on Spotify’s hyperpop playlist vary widely in style. A recent track-list update included songs that featured rapping in Chinese, vocals pitched to robotic or extraterrestrial tones, pure pop hooks, and even an adrenalized head rush of a dubstep song by the Russian activist group Pussy Riot, which seems to have taken a liking to the genre. (The update also included an ecstatic remix by A. G. Cook, the so-called godfather of hyperpop.) Most of the songs on the playlist, though, are unified by a bludgeoning irreverence, beats with breakneck tempos, and a maximalist electronic production style that sounds like it was designed to blow out speakers, or to be played on ones that are already damaged.

One artist often featured on the hyperpop playlist is a gangly, mop-headed sixteen-year-old named Ash Gutierrez, who performs as glaive, a name taken from the video game Dark Souls III. (It is technically inaccurate to say that he performs—Gutierrez has never performed live, nor has he ever even seen live music performed, as he said in a recent interview.) Gutierrez spent the early days of the pandemic in his bedroom, in a small rural town in North Carolina, acquainting himself with music-production software. Energized by artists like 100 gecs and a suite of emotional Internet rappers, Gutierrez began making beats and singing over them. Remote schooling had freed him from a fear of judgment by his classmates, and he gathered the courage to post some of his songs on SoundCloud. One of the first, called “sick,” was clearly part of the hyperpop lineage. The one-minute-and-thirty-second track begins with a set of bleeps and bloops that recall a video-game soundtrack, and Gutierrez’s voice is distorted, to sound high-pitched and alien. In a rapid patter, he describes the state of his brain: “I’m sick and I’m overstimulated / Neurons in my brain filled with information.”

Although amateurish and silly, the song is spellbinding. By the end of 2020, Gutierrez was appearing regularly on the hyperpop playlist and collaborating with other emerging talents of the genre, most notably an eighteen-year-old named ericdoa, whose music might be more aptly described as hyper-rap. Gutierrez also signed with Interscope Records and released a polished EP called “cypress grove,” which culled textures from alternative emo rock, hip-hop, electronic, and pop.

Glaive’s latest project, an EP titled “all dogs go to heaven,” suggests that, although Gutierrez may have been birthed into the hyperpop scene, he could soon graduate from its ranks. Much of hyperpop uses cartoonish electronic effects to render human emotions foreign, but Gutierrez shows so many genuine feelings on this record that those digital filters would have been inappropriate, and these days he tends to forgo them. On the EP, which is laden with bluesy guitar arrangements and overcast hip-hop beats, he plays the beleaguered protagonist of his own teen-age dramas, conveying small-time conflicts in anguished, cinematic proportions. “There’s a couple hundred people wanna end me / If you ever need a thing, promise you’ll text me,” he sings on “detest me,” a confident pop song. He expresses his sense of betrayal with such intensity and charm that it feels impossible not to take his side.

“All dogs go to heaven” showcases a startlingly well-formed sound—not just a high-concept joke—developed by an artist who began recording music only a year ago. Although his work has matured quickly, Gutierrez inadvertently reveals his age with references to childhood preoccupations and high-school-level coursework, name-checking the Berlin Wall, Quidditch, and the Capulets and the Montagues. Most of these songs will be more at home on bigger, more mainstream pop playlists than on hyperpop, though the EP includes a few notable exceptions. On “i wanna slam my head against the wall,” Gutierrez playfully inverts the dynamics of a conventional pop song. He sings sweetly, as if he were smiling, over a dizzying beat with the frantic rhythm of a drum-’n’-bass song.

The Internet has a tendency to transform subcultures into popular culture at a disorienting rate. Spotify’s hyperpop playlist is a curious case: its success has shown how corporate entities not only glom onto cultural waves but also become instrumental in shaping their identities. It’s a dynamic that can be vexing to artists. Last September, Spotify recruited A. G. Cook to do a “takeover” of the playlist, adding songs of his choosing. His selections included beloved, decades-old tracks by legacy artists like Kate Bush and J Dilla, a sign that perhaps he had misunderstood the nature of the playlist, or had taken a willfully broad approach. This rankled some of the musicians who were booted from the playlist to make room for Cook’s selections. Playlists can act as financial lifelines for featured artists; one hyperpop act named osquinn told the Times, “There were people who were literally living off that Spotify check.”

Other young artists have grown disillusioned with the hyperpop label, or resentful of its constraints. In a short time, hyperpop has already become a genre that performers wish to discard, deconstruct, or rebel against. A recent press release for an upcoming EP by the highly talented artist midwxst discouraged critics from tying him to hyperpop: “He’s part of this group of young kids leading this new subset of music . . . [but] he’s definitely not boxed into the hyperpop sound and on his new music he flows beyond the genre.” (Later, another press release described midwxst as a “rising hyperpop artist.”) As for Gutierrez, it is unclear whether he’ll help expand hyperpop’s boundaries or simply outgrow them. In an interview this year, he was asked about these classifications. He responded with a shrug, and said, “As long as people listen to the music, then I don’t really care.” ♦