# Hyperpop

Hyperpop (sometimes called bubblegum bass) is a loosely defined electronic music movement and microgenre that predominantly originated during the early 2010s. It is characterised by an exaggerated or maximalist take on popular music, and typically integrates pop and avant-garde sensibilities while drawing on elements commonly found in electronic, hip hop, and dance music.
The hyperpop music scene comes from a mix of different music styles. It is often linked to A. G. Cook, a musician from England, and his record label PC Music. Other artists connected to hyperpop include Sophie and Charli XCX. Music associated with this scene received wider attention in August 2019 when Glenn MacDonald, an employee of Spotify, used the term "hyperpop" for the name of a playlist featuring artists such as Cook and 100 gecs. The style got more popular with younger people through social media, especially TikTok. People think the COVID-19 lockdowns helped it spread. After the term "hyperpop" was used, many artists in this style did not like the label and even said the microgenre was "dead" starting in 2020.

## Characteristics

Hyper-pop embodies an exaggerated, eclectic, and self-referential approach to pop music and typically employs elements such as brash synth melodies, Auto-Tuned "earworm" vocals, and excessive compression and distortion, as well as surrealist or nostalgic references to 2000s Internet culture and the Web 2.0 era. Common features include vocals that are heavily processed; metallic, melodic percussion sounds; pitch-shifted synths; catchy choruses; short song lengths; and "shiny, cutesy aesthetics" juxtaposed with angst-ridden lyrics.
The Wall Street Journal's Mark Richardson described hyperpop as turning the "artificial" parts of pop music up to an extreme level, creating a "cartoonish wall of noise" that is full of catchy tunes and memorable hooks. The music moves between beautiful and ugly, with shimmery melodies crashing into mangled instrumentals. Joe Vitagliano, writing for American Songwriter, said hyperpop is an "exciting, bombastic, and iconoclastic genre — if it can even be called a 'genre'" and has "saw synths, auto-tuned vocals, glitch-inspired percussion and a distinctive late-capitalism-dystopia vibe." Artists in this style mix the avant-garde and pop music, often balancing between being addictively fun and a bit too much, according to Pitchfork's Kieran Press-Reynolds. He added that in 2024, hyperpop had become a "Frankensteinian macro-genre." Irony and humor are also important in this type of music.
According to Vice journalist Eli Enis, hyperpop is not so much about following music rules, but "a shared ethos of transcending genre altogether, while still operating within the context of pop." Artists in this style like to bring back semi-obscure music genres, and they enjoy messing with what is "cool" or "artistic." Hyperpop can mix many different kinds of music, like bubblegum pop, trance, Eurohouse, emo rap, nu metal, cloud rap, J-pop, and K-pop. Hyperpop also mix sounds from cloud rap, emo, lo-fi trap, trance, dubstep, and chiptune. The style has strange and surprising parts taken from hip hop since the mid-2010s. The Atlantic said the genre "swirls together and speeds up Top 40 tricks of present and past: a Janet Jackson drum slam here, a Depeche Mode synth squeal there, the overblown pep of novelty jingles throughout," but also said "the genre's zest for punk's brattiness, hip-hop's boastfulness, and metal's noise."
Hyperpop is often linked to the LGBTQ community and aesthetics. Several of its key practitioners are gay, non-binary, or transgender. The microgenre's emphasis on vocal modulation has allowed artists to experiment with the gender presentation of their voices, as well as to deal with gender dysphoria, and hyperpop artists such as Sophie and 8485 have explored gender fluidity and selfhood in their lyrical content.
Digicore and glitchcore are contemporaneous movements that are sometimes conflated with hyperpop due to its overlapping artists.

## Origins

The first instance of the term "hyperpop" was seemingly coined in October 1988 by writer Don Shewey in an article about the Scottish dream pop band Cocteau Twins, stating that England in the 1980s had "nurtured the simultaneous phenomena of hyperpop and antipop".
The origins of hyperpop are a bit unclear, like many things created on the internet. Sophie Walker from Complex said that it's hard to know exactly where it came from. The term "hyperpop" was sometimes used as a genre descriptor in the nightcore scene on SoundCloud. Spotify analyst Glenn McDonald said he first saw the term in 2014, referring to the UK label PC Music, but he did not think it was a microgenre until 2018. Even though other artists like Meishi Smile and Maltine Records helped shape the style, many people say hyperpop started with the music from PC Music in the mid-2010s. Many hyperpop artists are connected to or inspired by this label. Will Pritchard from The Independent said, "it's possible to see [hyperpop] as an expression not just of the genres it borrows from, but of the scene that evolved around A. G. Cook's PC Music label (an early home to Sophie and Charli XCX, among others) in the UK in the early 2010s."
There were many artists before hyperpop that helped shape the genre, as Pritchard explains, "to some, the ground covered by hyperpop won't seem all that new." He mentioned "outliers" from the 2000s nu rave, like Test Icicles, and PC Music contemporaries Rustie and Hudson Mohawke, who did similar things. About these two artists, he said their "fluoro, trance-edged smooshes of dance and hip-hop are reminiscent of a lot of hyperpop today." Another artist who helped influence hyperpop is Yasutaka Nakata. Heather Phares from All Music said that Sleigh Bells' music "foreshadowed hyperpop" and other artists who "brazenly ignored genre boundaries and united the extremes of sweet and heavy." Ian Cohen from Pitchfork also said that the term "hyperpop" described Sleigh Bells before it became a popular genre. Eilish Gilligan from Junkee credited Kesha for impacting hyperpop, pointing out that her "grating, half-spoken vocal featured in Blow and all of her early work, in fact, feel reminiscent of a lot of the intense vocals in hyperpop today." She also mentioned Britney Spears, saying that her "2011 dancefloor fillers 'Till The World Ends', 'Hold It Against Me' and 'I Wanna Go' all share the same pounding beats that populate modern hyperpop."
Spotify editor Lizzy Szabo referred to A. G. Cook as the "godfather" of hyperpop. According to Enis, PC Music "laid the groundwork for [the microgenre's] melodic exuberance and cartoonish production", with some of hyperpop's surrealist qualities also derived from 2010s hip hop. She states that hyperpop built on the influence of PC Music, but also incorporated the sounds of emo rap, cloud rap, trap, trance, dubstep and chiptune. Among Cook's frequent collaborators, Variety and The New York Times described the work of Sophie as pioneering the style, while Charli XCX was described as "queen" of the style by Vice, and her 2017 mixtape Pop 2 set a template for its sound, featuring "outré" production by AG Cook, Sophie, Umru, and Easyfun as well as "a titular mission to give pop – sonically, spiritually, aesthetically – a facelift for the modern age."
Aliya Chaudhury from Kerrang! explained that crunkcore, metalcore, and nu metal were key to creating hyperpop. She said nu metal's "hybrid of hip-hop, metal, funk, industrial and beyond lends itself perfectly to the hyperpop ideology," with Rico Nasty drawing from it and 100 gecs remixing Linkin Park's "One Step Closer." Chaudhury also pointed out that Rina Sawayama's debut Sawayama "draws from Limp Bizkit and Evanescence," helping bring back nu metal. For crunkcore, she noted Metro Station and Cobra Starship "created exaggerated pop songs that mixed in rock, hip-hop and dance influences," while Breathe Carolina "used heavy electronics to create catchy pop tunes." Chaudhury believes 3OH!3 "created the main blueprint for hyperpop" with their "ability to parody pop and take it to bewildering extremes," using "blown-out synths, and modulated vocals." Lastly, she mentioned metalcore's "most electronic-leaning artists" influencing hyperpop, highlighting Dorian Electra's album My Agenda, which includes the song "Monk Mode" with black metal band Gaylord.

## Popularity

In May 2019, hyperpop duo 100 gecs released their debut album 1000 gecs (2019), which amassed millions of listens on streaming services and helped to consolidate the style. In Pritchard's description, 100 Gecs took hyperpop "to its most extreme, and extremely catchy, conclusions: stadium-sized trap beats processed and distorted to near-destruction, overwrought emo vocals and cascades of ravey arpeggios." According to Vice and The Face, a second wave of the genre emerged in 2019 following the release of 1000 gecs.
In August 2019, Spotify launched the "Hyperpop" playlist which further cemented the microgenre, and featured guest curation from 100 Gecs and others. Other artists featured on the playlist included AG Cook, Popstar Patch, Slayyyter, Gupi, Caroline Polachek, Hannah Diamond, and Kim Petras. Spotify editor Lizzy Szabo and her colleagues landed on the name for their August 2019 playlist after McDonald noted the term in the website's metadata and classified it as a microgenre. In November, Cook added artists including J Dilla, Nicki Minaj, Iggy Azalea, Lil Uzi Vert and Kate Bush to the playlist, which caused controversy due to these additions pushing out smaller hyperpop artists who relied upon the playlist for their earnings. In addition, David Turner, a former strategy manager at SoundCloud, noted a "spike in March and April 2020 from new creators," on the platform, many of which were making hyperpop-adjacent music.
The microgenre began to see rise in popularity in 2020, with the prominence of the Spotify playlist and its spread within younger audiences on social media, such as on TikTok, particularly "alt TikTok", one of the main countercultures on the app. In 2022, Ringtone Mag suggested that part of the reason the microgenre rose in popularity across the platform was due to its nature of favouring heavy beats to which creators could dance and make transitions. Pitchfork has credited the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic for its rise. Hyperpop albums like Charli XCX's how i'm feeling now (2020) and A. G. Cook's Apple (2020) appeared on critics' 2020 end-of-year lists. Hyperpop artist ElyOtto's song "SugarCrash!" became one of the most popular songs in the app's history, and was used in over 5 million videos on the platform by July 2021.
Subculture, a "hyperpop rave", gained prominence alongside the rise of the microgenre and continued during the pandemic through six-hour long "Zoom parties", welcoming over 1,000 guests at its peak and hosting raves in cities across the United States after the pandemic. In 2023, the rave gained attention from Rolling Stone for its mix of PC Music artists and others under the hyperpop umbrella, including rap-influenced artists from SoundCloud, as well as its significant LGBTQ inclusion. The raves operate as a useful networking event for artists that attend.
Internationally, hyperpop gained notoriety in Hispanic countries, such as Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Spain, particularly with Spanish-speaking artists and producers. Nylon's Ben Jolley cited Putochinomaricón as one of the "biggest names in the scene."

## Perceived decline

Questions concerning the potential decline of the microgenre, the corporate influences upon it, and the meaning of the 'hyperpop' name, began to be raised in 2021. Charli XCX, in August 2021, posted a tweet asking "rip hyperpop? discuss". In 2022, Dazed noted that since 2019, the word 'hyperpop' "has since become a catch-all phrase for any and all forms of extreme pop music," and that "sonically, you'd be hard pressed to find any internet-born music made in the last decade that hasn't been retroactively brandished as hyperpop", also stating that "almost all of those given the label have grown disillusioned with the term, or grown irritated by its constraints." The same year, prominent hyperpop musician Glaive stated that he and Ericdoa were "working on killing" the movement, though three months later stated that it "will never die." He later stated that the packaging of the community within the name 'hyperpop' for profit led to its music becoming "algorithmic" over time. Subculture organisers Gannon Baxter and Tyler Shepherd expressed mixed feelings about their use of the term "hyperpop", but Shepherd stated that their use of the term was "just a tool to quickly convey what realm of music we’re talking about". In June 2023, PC Music announced that after that year, the label would not be releasing new music, instead turning to archival projects and special reissues. In September 2023 Underscores, another significant contributor to the microgenre, stated that it was "officially dead".
In October 2024, Kieran Press-Reynolds of Pitchfork commended the past success of the hyperpop scene but remarked that "none of [its] artists [had] soared in an enduring way" and that "the 'pop' in hyperpop proved a total bust". He credited this "dispersal" to several factors, including "conflicting visions of its practitioners, the lifting of COVID-19 lockdowns, and the fact that some of its most promising musicians didn’t want fame and actively recoiled from it." Despite this, Charli XCX's album Brat, which had a successful commercial performance in the US, UK and Australia, and according to Metacritic had the highest ratings of 2024 from critics, has been described as hyperpop.

## Related genres
### Bubblegum Bass

Bubblegum Bass, credited as hyperpop's first "era" by Pitchfork, is sometimes used as a term to define the specific sound associated with art collective PC Music. Artists in this wave include Hannah Diamond, GFOTY and A. G. Cook, all contributors to the PC Music label.

### Digicore

Digicore is a microgenre related to hyperpop. The term ("digi" is short for "digital") was adopted in the mid-2010s by an online community of teenage musicians, communicating through Discord, to distinguish themselves from the preexisting hyperpop scene. This microgenre saw a rise during the COVID-19 pandemic. It differs from hyperpop mainly through the racial identities of its artists but there remains a degree of crossover between the scenes. Digicore artist Billy Bugara wrote that his colleagues "pull from genres as wide-reaching as midwestern emo, trance, and even Chicago drill." The beginnings of digicore are rooted in internet culture and many popular producers from the microgenre are between the ages of 15 and 18. In 2018, Dalton (a digicore artist relations figure) started a Minecraft and Discord server called "Loser's Club" that became a haven for several of the most popular artists within the digicore scene such as Quinn, Glaive, Ericdoa and Midwxst. This sense of community and collaboration have become key tenets within the scene, and have contributed to the rise in the popularity of the microgenre as a whole, with a majority of the scene preferring the idea of rising in popularity as a collective rather than as individuals. In 2021, the digicore album Frailty by Jane Remover received praise on mainstream music sites Pitchfork and Paste.

### Glitchcore

Glitchcore, a microgenre related to hyperpop and digicore (sometimes characterised as a subgenre of both styles), is often characterised by high-pitched vocals, sharp 808s, and frequent hi-hats. As one article stated, "Glitchcore is Hyperpop on steroids", referring to the exaggerated vocals, distortions, glitch noises, and other pop elements present within Glitchcore. One of the most defining elements of glitchcore is vocal glitch patterns, created by rapidly repeating a section of a vocal sample. 100 Gecs played a significant role in establishing the sound of glitchcore music by blending various genres and pushing the boundaries of sound experimentation.
Stef, a producer of the popular Hyperpop and glitchcore collective 'Helix Tears' stated that there certainly is a difference between the two microgenres, saying "Hyperpop is more melodic and poppy" while "Glitchcore is indescribable". Glitchcore is typically made up of artists that share stylistic similarities to 100 Gecs, rather than the musicians signed to PC Music.
TikTok played a key role in popularising glitchcore, through video edits to two viral glitchcore songs "NEVER MET!" by CMTEN and Glitch Gum and "Pressure" by David Shawty and Yungster Jack. Glitchcore has also been associated with a specific visual aesthetic where videos are typically accompanied by glitchy, fast-paced, cluttered, colourful edits that are even marked with flash warnings in certain cases. Some popular digicore artists like d0llywood1 even refer to glitchcore as "an aesthetic, like the edits", rather than an actual music genre.

### Hyper Mandelão

Hyper Mandelão, or Hyperfunky, is the result of the fusion of mandelão, a subgenre of funk carioca and slap house, with hyperpop and influence of industrial music. The main artists of this style are DJ Mu540, DJ Ramemes and Pabllo Vittar.

### Dariacore

Dariacore, also known as hyperflip, is a microgenre related to hyperpop. It was coined by Jane Remover following her 2021 album Dariacore and its two sequels, "Dariacore 2: Enter Here, Hell to the Left" and "Dariacore 3... At least I think that's what it's called?". The microgenre gained popularity on SoundCloud in 2021 and 2022. Dariacore is characterised by sped up and pitch-shifted samples from pop music and other popular media, breakbeats, and Jersey club influence. The genre was described by Raphael Helfand of The Fader as "an entire genre in and of itself, taking hyperpop's silliest tendencies to their logical conclusions".

### Krushclub

Krushclub is a microgenre of underground music that garnered attention on TikTok in the mid-2020s. This microgenre is a fusion of several distinct musical styles, including Electronic Dance Music and Jersey club, and is notable for incorporating elements from Electro house, Techno, Scene Music, Eurodance and Electropop. Krushclub music combines bitcrushed electrodance beats with melodic pop rap vocals that are layered with autotune and distortion, creating a distinctive "Hexxed" sound. The bitcrushed beats feature a textured, distorted quality that provides a driving rhythm.
Krushclub musicians such as Lumi Athena, Odetari, cade clair, asteria, Britney Manson, 6arelyhuman, 9lives, removeface, jnhygs, xxanteria, kyszenn, and kets4eki saw niche success thanks to websites like SoundCloud and TikTok.