Hyperpop

• 1. Introduction

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  Hyperpop first entered the language in October 1988. Writer Don Shewey was describing England as having "nurtured the simultaneous phenomena of hyperpop and antipop" in an article about the Scottish dream pop band Cocteau Twins. Nobody followed up on the word. It sat dormant in print for decades, waiting for the music it would eventually name.

  By the early 2010s, that music had emerged from a small art collective in London. It was brash, cartoonish, and tender all at once. It drew equally from sugary pop and industrial noise. Its artists were often queer, often teenagers, and often difficult to place in any existing category.

  The questions worth asking are not simply what hyperpop sounds like. They are how a Spotify data analyst's metadata tag became a cultural identity, why the genre's own founders publicly declared it dead, and what it left behind when they did.

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• 2. A Cartoonish Wall of Noise

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  Mark Richardson of The Wall Street Journal described hyperpop as turning the artificial parts of pop music up to an extreme level. The result, he wrote, was a "cartoonish wall of noise" full of catchy tunes and memorable hooks. Shimmery melodies crash into mangled instrumentals. The music moves freely between beautiful and ugly.

  Vice journalist Eli Enis framed it less as a sound than as a stance. For Enis, hyperpop is not about following rules. It is "a shared ethos of transcending genre altogether, while still operating within the context of pop." In practice, that meant short songs, pitch-shifted synths, and vocals processed until they glitter or distort. Metallic percussion and ironic or angst-ridden lyrics round out the palette.

  The Atlantic described the style as swirling together Top 40 tricks from past and present. A Janet Jackson drum slam here. A Depeche Mode synth squeal there. The same publication also noted the genre's zest for punk's brattiness, hip-hop's boastfulness, and metal's noise.

  Writing for American Songwriter, Joe Vitagliano highlighted the "saw synths, auto-tuned vocals, glitch-inspired percussion and a distinctive late-capitalism-dystopia vibe." NPR's Sheldon Pearce called it a controversial catch-all for a music of excess and kitsch. It was, he wrote, unafraid of the abjectly cybernated or lowbrow. Its ambition, he added, was to find "the sound of the dissociated online self." By 2024, Pitchfork's Kieran Press-Reynolds had taken to calling it a "Frankensteinian macro-genre." That sprawl traced back to a single record label, founded in London in 2013.

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• 3. What Came Before

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  Journalist Aliya Chaudhury credited 3OH!3 with creating "the main blueprint for hyperpop." Their blown-out synths, modulated vocals, and capacity to parody pop at bewildering extremes prefigured what came after. AllMusic's Heather Phares stated that Sleigh Bells' music "foreshadowed hyperpop," a view shared by Pitchfork's Ian Cohen, who had once used the term to describe that band's sound specifically.

  Will Pritchard of the Independent pointed to outliers from the 2000s nu rave scene, including Test Icicles, as pursuing similar territory. He also cited producers Rustie and Hudson Mohawke, noting that their "fluoro, trance-edged smooshes of dance and hip-hop are reminiscent of a lot of hyperpop today." Other sources named London musician Max Tundra as a direct influence on and progenitor of the genre.

  Eilish Gilligan, writing for Junkee, noted that Kesha's early vocals felt "reminiscent of a lot of the intense vocals in hyperpop today." She specifically cited the "grating, half-spoken vocal featured in Blow and all of her early work." Gilligan also pointed to three Britney Spears tracks from 2011: "Till The World Ends," "Hold It Against Me," and "I Wanna Go." All three shared the pounding beats that would come to populate the genre. The term would find its stable home with a London art collective and record label established in 2013.

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• 4. The London Collective

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  A. G. Cook founded PC Music as a record label and art collective in London in 2013. Spotify editor Lizzy Szabo would later call him the "godfather" of hyperpop. The label brought together artists including Hannah Diamond, GFOTY, Sophie, and Hayden Dunham. Pitchfork credited this period as hyperpop's first "era" and as establishing the sound that would later define the genre more broadly.

  Among Cook's collaborators, Variety and the New York Times both described Sophie's work as pioneering the style. Charli XCX brought the sound a wider audience. Her 2016 EP Vroom Vroom and her 2017 mixtape Pop 2 set a template for what hyperpop could be. Both records featured production by Cook, Sophie, Umru, and Easyfun. Vice described Charli XCX as the "queen" of the genre.

  Sophie's 2018 song "Immaterial" became a touchstone for the scene. Writer Sophie Walker of The Forty-Five named it the best hyperpop song of all time, stating that "hyperpop is nothing without Sophie." The style Cook and his collaborators built drew from bubblegum pop, Eurohouse, hip hop, trance, J-pop, K-pop, emo, and nu-metal. By 2018, a Spotify data analyst had quietly given the whole movement a formal name in the platform's internal metadata.

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• 5. A Tag Becomes a Playlist

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  In August 2019, Spotify senior editor Lizzy Szabo launched the "Hyperpop" playlist. The name came not from her own coinage but from the platform's internal metadata. That tag had been added by data analyst Glenn McDonald in 2018. McDonald ran the genre database Every Noise at Once. He had first encountered the term in 2014, in reference to PC Music. McDonald did not think of it as a "microgenre" until years later.

  In May 2019, hyperpop duo 100 gecs had released their debut album 1000 gecs, which amassed millions of listens on streaming services. Their hit "Money Machine" had already reached a new generation of listeners. The Hyperpop playlist found a ready audience. Featured artists included AG Cook, Slayyyter, Gupi, Caroline Polachek, Hannah Diamond, and Kim Petras, alongside guest curation from 100 gecs themselves.

  When Cook later added J Dilla, Nicki Minaj, Lil Uzi Vert, and Kate Bush to the playlist, controversy followed. Their inclusion pushed out smaller hyperpop artists who had relied on the playlist for their earnings. Former SoundCloud strategy manager David Turner was, at the same time, observing a spike in new creators making hyperpop-adjacent music. He cited March and April 2020 as the key period.

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• 6. The Pandemic Wave

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  Charli XCX recorded her 2020 album how i'm feeling now entirely during the COVID-19 lockdowns. It appeared on critics' end-of-year lists alongside A. G. Cook's Apple, also released that year. Both records arrived when the internet had become, for many listeners, a primary social space.

  On the 25th of September 2020, Pitchfork cited Alt TikTok as having a direct influence on wider music trends. Rolling Stone had described Alt TikTok as "one of the main countercultures on the app." Pitchfork noted that musician Ayesha Erotica's work had become popular on TikTok. Every "hyperpop explainer" video, the publication observed, was met with comments about the erasure of her influence on the genre.

  In July 2021, ElyOtto's song "SugarCrash!" became one of the most popular songs in TikTok history. It was used in over 5 million videos on the platform. In Los Angeles, a series of virtual events called "Subculture" had taken hold during the lockdowns. These ran as six-hour Zoom parties, welcoming over 1,000 guests at their peak. After the lockdowns ended, Subculture moved into physical venues across the United States.

  By 2023, Rolling Stone was covering these events, highlighting their mix of PC Music artists and SoundCloud rap-influenced musicians. Organizer Tyler Shepherd called hyperpop "just a tool to quickly convey what realm of music we're talking about." Nylon's Ben Jolley named Putochinomaricón as one of the "biggest names in the scene."

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• 7. Queer Culture at the Core

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  Sophie and 8485 are among the artists who explore themes of gender fluidity directly in their work. The connection between hyperpop and LGBTQ+ community runs deep. Several key artists within the scene identify as gay, non-binary, or transgender. Primary influences draw from queer culture, and the genre has long been associated with the LGBTQ+ community in press coverage and among its participants.

  Vocal processing proved especially significant. The genre's emphasis on pitch-shifting and heavy modulation gave artists a means to experiment with gender presentation and androgyny in their voices. For some, that was a way of exploring identity through sound. For others, it offered a vehicle for navigating gender dysphoria.

  Collectives like Novagang and Helix Tears, according to Rolling Stone, brought together artists of variously different styles and sounds. Their shared bond was, Rolling Stone wrote, "a shared rejection of stylistic limits." Rolling Stone also specifically noted the Subculture raves' significant LGBTQ inclusion. The events operated as useful networking spaces for a community whose cultural identity had taken shape through the music. In Asia, artists Effie and 4s4ki were named by Billboard and Dazed as influential in the regional hyperpop scene.

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• 8. Decline and What Remained

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  Dazed observed that since 2019, hyperpop had "become a catch-all phrase for any and all forms of extreme pop music." Almost all of those given the label, the publication noted, had grown disillusioned with it. Online streaming algorithms drew criticism for pigeon-holing the genre into conventions that stifled innovation.

  In August 2021, Charli XCX asked on Twitter: "rip hyperpop? discuss." Glaive, a prominent artist in the scene, stated that he and Ericdoa were "working on killing" the movement. Three months later, he reversed course and said it "will never die." Underscores, another significant contributor to the scene, stated that the genre was "officially dead." Pitchfork's Kieran Press-Reynolds cited several causes for the stall. He pointed to conflicting visions among the genre's practitioners and the end of COVID-19 lockdowns. Some promising musicians, Press-Reynolds added, had actively recoiled from fame.

  In June 2023, PC Music announced it would stop releasing new music, pivoting to archival projects and special reissues. Yet the genre's commercial story was still being written. Charli XCX's 2024 album Brat, described specifically as a hyperpop album, was a critical and popular success. Sam Smith and Kim Petras had already taken "Unholy" to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Commercial success had arrived just as the scene's original community was stepping back.

  Sigilkore, jerk, rage, hexD, and krushclub were among the microgenres that grew out of hyperpop's experiments. The rise of indie sleaze and the recession pop revival also traced connections to the genre. On the 17th of September 2024, Google displayed a Doodle honoring SOPHIE on her birthday. In 2025, the company marked pride month with a Doodle celebrating the genre as a whole. The administrative label Glenn McDonald added to a Spotify database in 2018 had, by then, warranted a tribute from the world's largest search engine.

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