c/o Rolling Stone

This May marks the two-year anniversary of 100 gecs’ debut album, “1000 gecs,” a work that quickly gained cult status before attaining widespread internet fame and cultural relevance. Rolling Stone ranked it as the 19th best album of 2019, and the LP’s most popular song, “money machine,” currently has over 48 million streams on Spotify. 100 gecs has even gone on to play the role of genre-ambassador, taking over Spotify’s Hyperpop playlist last summer. 

Since the rise of 100 gecs, many similar “hyperpop” artists have enjoyed significant mainstream success, perhaps most notably Charli XCX with her quarantine project, “how I’m feeling now.” Meanwhile, while TikTok has been inundated with DIY tutorials on how to make “hyperpop,” critics have been tasked with codifying this new musical phenomenon into a concise genre. It’s a particularly strange task because, while it is apparent that 100 gecs and Charli XCX are riding the same wave, their music doesn’t sound all that similar. In fact, a quick browse through the aforementioned Spotify hyperpop playlist will yield a variety of musical influences, from hip hop to EDM to jangly 2010s-era pop. “1000 gecs” itself is an album filled with musical contradiction, scraping aesthetics from internet memes, and punk music alike. 

Many critics have tried to pin down the genre as pop “maximalism,” but this too falls short, as there are plenty of sparsely arranged songs that easily fit into the hyperpop niche. Like the musical style of hyperpop, the origins of pop maximalism are highly contested as well.

While 100 gecs did much to bring hyperpop to prominence, the story does not begin with them. The origin of the genre is often linked with nightcore, an internet subgenre in which pop songs are simply sped up (and therefore pitched up). Alternatively, the hyperpop origin story has also centered around PC Music, an enthusiastically cyber-cultural British record label that’s been around since 2013. With all this confusion, Vice’s music section Noisey went so far as to call “hyperpop” a “genre tag for the genre-less.” Although many artists may resist their inclusion in such a nebulous category, the cultural coalescence around the term indicates that “hyperpop” at least means something.

What is this something, then, if not a cohesive musical style? While most genres are defined by their musical tropes, hyperpop is best defined by its distinct attitude toward sound. This attitude values manipulation, distortion, and exaggeration, specifically as they relate to the digital world. Concisely, hyperpop can be defined by its love for digital affectation. 

There are two production techniques that are nearly ubiquitous in hyperpop music: (1) heavily auto-tuned vocals and (2) over-compression. These techniques can be utilized for a variety of musical styles, but both serve hyperpop’s aesthetic interest. 

Culturally prominent since the late 2000s, auto-tune is a digital effect that “corrects” the pitch of a vocal performance to the nearest note frequency. The human voice, of course, can’t switch instantaneously between two notes, nor can it sustain a note without deviating from its exact frequency. Therefore, the ear recognizes the effect of auto-tune as identifiably digital. Furthermore, the effect uses the human voice, the opposite of a digital sound source. As a result, auto-tune doesn’t simply signify the digital; it signifies the digitized. 

Over-compression, like auto-tune, is deeply rooted in the digital age of music. Digital-era producers, particularly dance music producers, often sought to get their music to the absolute highest volumes possible, employing various forms of volume compression and limiting. In extreme cases, producers used what’s called brickwall limiting: they would raise the volume of their entire song, and when the track volume hit the digital limit of 0.0 decibels, the audio would adjust accordingly as to not go over. To achieve this, a song’s louder transients (often kick drums) would cause the song as a whole to decrease in volume. The resultant effect is known as “pumping,” and while the traditional music engineer would hear such over-compression as a mistake, the technique has been used deliberately and creatively for quite some time throughout a variety of genres. 

Auto-tune and over-compression both accentuate the peculiarities of music’s entrance into the digital age. Their heavy usage in hyperpop indicates the genre’s focus on digital artifacts, the extremities of computed sound, and the idiosyncrasies of new music-making technologies.

With these defining fascinations, hyperpop finds better analogies in the industrial scene of the ’90s than it does in the last two decades of pop music. Consider the evolution of artifacts found in older rock music technologies such as the electric guitar. At first, feedback, distortion, and overdrive were new kinds of mistakes. But soon after their discovery, they were enthusiastically used for creative effect. The same can be said about the inhuman, metronomic pulse of ’80s-era sequencers and the stray buzzes and hums of analog synthesizers. By the end of the ’80s and well into the ’90s, these technological affectations converged into the pummeling, sonically brutal genre of industrial music. Much like hyperpop, industrial music largely revolved around blisteringly fast tempos, a symptom of the genre’s proclivity toward sonic extremes.

This tendency toward the extreme is an interesting one, as it doesn’t necessarily consider songwriting, style or harmony. It’s truly “sonic” in the literal sense. As a result, hyperpop is, in a way, subversive. With its focus on the digital affectation of sound, the genre repudiates the typical level of cultural signage through which music usually transmits: melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and instrumental tropes. These elements, which adequately define the typical musical genre, fail to qualify the boundaries of hyperpop, since the common thread of hyperpop simply isn’t built on the language of songwriting. It’s built on something more fundamentally aesthetic in nature: a love for digital oddity and its effect on music, whatever that music may be.

Matthew Rubenstein can be reached out at mnrubenstein@wesleyan.edu