“It feels as though anyone pushing the boundaries in electronic pop right now is being labeled ‘hyperpop’,” says London artist twst. In less than two years, it’s gone from genre du jour to genre du don’t – it’s very mention is enough to elicit eye rolls from anyone involved. It’s a nebulous term, encompassing a huge range of styles, sounds, and scenes that seem bound solely by their propensity towards the extreme. If the word ‘simulation’ connotes an imitation of something, then ‘hyperpop’ is both a simulation of itself and the music it claims to represent. The music jumps from absurdist pop to Soundcloud rap and intimate experimentalism – a mix so seemingly disparate that the only thing bringing them together is their knack at pushing the pop envelope. 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. Since then, however, the word has since become a catch-all phrase for any and all forms of extreme pop music, from the glossy sounds of PC Music and the AutoTuned croons of Drain Gang, to the death glitch screams of Alice Glass and Arca’s cyborgian lullabies. In an article I wrote last year, 23-year-old artist Alice Gas described the music as “being made by kids in their bedrooms with mics and FL Studio”. Born on SoundCloud via Discord servers and Minecraft channels, the sound is maximalist, chaotic, and lo-fi, with many of the original artists in their teens or early twenties. Launched in 2019, following the unlikely popularity of 100 gecs, the hyperpop playlist was originally meant to platform the extremely online strain of experimental music that critics like to call hyperpop. “ Hyperpop is a simulation,” reads the text that accompanies Spotify’s now-infamous playlist.
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