Hyperpop got its name from a line of Spotify metadata
A data analyst tagged some tracks hyperpop in Spotify's system in 2018. A year later a playlist editor spotted the label, built a playlist around it, and a scattered online scene of distorted, sugary, chaotic pop suddenly had a name. Lockdown TikTok did the rest, carrying it to a generation of teenagers.
The sound itself began earlier, in early-2010s Britain. Its roots are usually traced to PC Music, the label and art collective run by A. G. Cook, whose circle included Sophie, Hannah Diamond and Charli XCX. Their glossy, exaggerated style was first nicknamed bubblegum bass. Then in 2019 the 100 Gecs song Money Machine went viral, and Spotify's Lizzy Szabo launched her influential Hyperpop playlist using the tag the analyst Glenn McDonald had created. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Alt TikTok spread it widely among Gen Z.
Hyperpop takes the most artificial parts of pop and pushes them to extremes. Typical ingredients include brash synth lines, heavily Auto-Tuned hooks, crushing compression and distortion, clanging metallic percussion, pitch-shifted synths, short songs and cute, shiny imagery set against angsty or ironic lyrics, often with nostalgic nods to 2000s internet culture. Critics have reached for vivid descriptions: The Wall Street Journal heard a cartoonish wall of noise, while The Atlantic noted borrowings from Janet Jackson drums and Depeche Mode synths alongside punk brattiness and metal noise.
The scene draws deeply on queer culture, and a number of its central figures are gay, trans or non-binary. Heavy vocal processing gives performers room to play with androgyny and gender presentation, and artists such as Sophie and 8485 have written about gender fluidity. The Vice journalist Eli Enis summed up the ethos as trying to transcend genre while still working inside pop.
Success brought backlash. Once hyperpop went mainstream in the early 2020s, many artists first linked with it rejected the label, and the flow of new names slowed. Its fingerprints remain on a swarm of online microgenres, among them rage and jerk, and on revivals such as indie sleaze. By 2024, a Pitchfork writer was calling it a Frankensteinian macro-genre.
Source: Hyperpop
