How Hyperpop Got Its Name

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 ends before you have finished noticing it has started. Almost a decade of music collapsed into a single mood board.

The surprise is that the word itself is recent. Hyperpop entered general use in August 2019 as the title of a Spotify editorial playlist. The label's editors needed a bucket for the duo 100 gecs and the SoundCloud rappers orbiting them, and the bucket needed a name. Hyperpop fit.

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, glossy, often 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 adjacent to PC Music was the Scottish producer SOPHIE, whose 2015 compilation Product weaponised the same impulses with harder edges — latex-bright synths, rubber-band basslines, percussion that sounded like metal against metal. SOPHIE's death in 2021 ended one of the most distinctive producer voices of the 2010s, but by then the sound had escaped containment.

The canonical bridge to the mainstream is Charli XCX's 2016 EP Vroom Vroom, produced by SOPHIE. It was billed as Pop and Pop critics largely refused to call it that. The acoustic ancestor of Charli's 2024 album brat — which spent the summer at the centre of the chart — is sitting right here, eight years earlier.

In 2019, an American duo named 100 gecs — Dylan Brady in Los Angeles and Laura Les in St. Louis, mostly collaborating over Discord — released an album called 1000 gecs. Ten tracks, 23 minutes, every PC Music habit 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, midwxst, aldn — were swept into the bucket. They preferred the term digicore, which was 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. If you have decided it is brilliant, you are hearing exactly what the duo 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 did something quieter than most genres get credit for. It taught a decade of Pop producers that a song does not have to sound polite to be a hit. The default aesthetic that Cook, SOPHIE and the PC Music orbit had been building since 2013 turned out, in retrospect, to have been the next chapter of mainstream Pop all along.