Say Hyperpop and certain images arrive in order: a pitched-up vocal, a metallic kick, a screen full of pink and cyan, a song that is over before you have quite registered it began. Nearly a decade of music, collapsed into a single mood board.

The surprise is how recent the word is, and how administrative its origins are. Hyperpop began as a genre tag that Spotify's data analyst Glenn McDonald had added to the service's metadata in 2018. In August 2019 an editor adopted that tag as the title of an editorial playlist — a bucket for the duo 100 gecs and the SoundCloud rappers orbiting them, with a name already waiting in the database.

That is a strange origin story. The aesthetic predated the name by six years. To find where it actually came from, you have to go back to a small London record label that, in 2013, almost no one took seriously.

In 2013 a 22-year-old Londoner named A. G. Cook started a label called PC Music. The records were short and glossy — and often given away free — and they sounded like advertising jingles for pop stars who did not exist. Reviewers were not sure whether the project was sincere or a long-running joke at the expense of mainstream pop. The label's answer was that it could be both at once.

Working close to that aesthetic was the Scottish producer SOPHIE, whose signature was a texture pop had not heard before: latex-bright synths, rubber-band basslines, percussion that sounded like metal struck against metal. She emerged on the Glasgow label Numbers rather than PC Music itself, guarded her identity for years, and in 2017 came out as a trans woman with the single It's Okay to Cry. Her 2015 compilation Product gave the same deliberately artificial sound harder edges. SOPHIE's death in 2021 ended one of the most distinctive producer voices of the 2010s, but by then the sound had spread far beyond any one label.

The canonical bridge to the mainstream is Charli XCX's 2016 EP Vroom Vroom, produced by SOPHIE. It was billed as pop, and critics largely refused to call it that. The sonic ancestor of Charli's 2024 album brat is sitting right here, eight years earlier.

In 2019, an American duo named 100 gecs — Dylan Brady in Los Angeles and Laura Les in Chicago, both from the St. Louis area, building the record remotely by sending project files back and forth — released an album called 1000 gecs. Ten tracks, 23 minutes, every PC Music tic pushed into pop-punk, ska, nu-metal and dubstep territory. The result was funny in a way that pop was not supposed to be allowed to be.

After the Spotify playlist appeared in August 2019, a tier of younger SoundCloud artists — glaive, ericdoa — were absorbed into the same category. They preferred a related term, digicore: more home-recorded, more rap-centred, and more honest about the lineage from emo rap and SoundCloud hip-hop. But the label that stuck publicly was Hyperpop.

The gecs track below is a useful 30-second test. If by the time the chorus arrives you have decided it is unbearable, you are hearing exactly what the duo intended. And if you have decided it is brilliant — also exactly what they intended.

By 2024, Charli XCX's brat was the album of the summer. The mainstream had decided that intentional excess — synth presets that should not work together, vocals processed past the point of human plausibility, melodies that arrive a beat too fast — was not a joke after all.

Hyperpop pulled off the quietest kind of revolution: almost nobody called it one. It taught a decade of pop producers that a song does not have to sound polite to be a hit. The aesthetic Cook, SOPHIE and the PC Music orbit had been building since 2013 turned out to be the next chapter of mainstream pop all along.