Hyperpop: why American music isn’t boring

Hyperpop came out of the birth canal backwards. In August 2019, Spotify created a playlist that assembled an amorphous new crop of mostly North American, mostly teenage, banger-makers, providing them with a ​“hub” that put their music in the ears of more mainstream listeners. (It also resulted in enough streams for these niche artists to receive their first royalty cheques.)

Its creation was a direct response to the popularity of Midwestern electronic duo 100 Gecs, who’d found success making out-of-the-way experimental pop for the leetspeak crowd. However, some artists felt as though their music – emo-rap, nightcore (pitch-shifted songs), ambient – had been repackaged and sold without their consent. A year after the playlist’s inception, Charli XCX tweeted: ​“What is hyperpop?”

Some of the replies simply read: ​“You, ma’am.”

Yet the earlier origins of hyperpop are tough to pin down. Go back to 2013, as many would advise, and you have the primordial British collective PC Music, founded and fronted by superproducer AG Cook. PC Music had created underground hits like Hey QT by QT and Beautiful by Cook. They torqued the Auto-Tune knob up to 11 to make songs with pitched-up baby voices, blaring bass and squeally synths – hallmarks of conventional pop that were pushed to the brink and toyed with consumerist irony (​“Maybelline, maybell-icious/ Topman, Topshop, top” the Lipgloss Twins sang on Wannabe). While never an official member of the collective, Charli XCX has been one of its biggest supporters and most famous allies, smuggling PC Music’s experimental ideas to a bigger audience inside the Trojan horse of maximalist chart pop.

Although PC Music splintered as a collective in the late 2010s, the surprising mainstream embrace of 100 Gecs’ 2019 debut album 1000 Gecs (it reached #7 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart) signalled thestart of a new wave of this Ritalin-rattled music. Dylan Brady, one half of Gecs, curated a new Spotify hyperpop playlist in July 2020 and set up a label, Dog Show Records, to sign newer acts such as Gupi, Bean Boy, Folie and Alice Longyu Gao. These artists have inherited many of the distinct characteristics of PC Music while adding their own glitches, pitch-bends, distortion and, in some cases, the unlikely sing-song of emo rap à la Lil Peep (Ericdoa) or a Britney Spears Circus sample (food house, aka Fraxiom and Gupi).

Yet with the microgenre still so undercooked, not even its makers know quite how to define it. Ericdoa’s music, for example, is emo rap-inspired. Blackwinterwells has been producing for a decade and makes more downbeat, ambient music. Fraxiom and Petal Supply are injecting a pixie stick’s worth of ​“hyper” into hyperpop. And big labels are clamouring to sign them.

As for how hyperpop is made, it has little bearing to any other scene that has come before. The artists taught themselves how to use professional beat-making software like FL Studio. Beats are swapped between musicians on the still-underground social sharing app Discord, thus making geographical location moot.

“I DMed him and I was like: ​‘Your song is good, do you wanna get on my song?’” CMTEN said of NEVER MET!, his aptly titled collaboration with Glitch Gum. Some of these teens still live in their parents’ basements in flyover states and have never played a live show. Many have seen a popularity boost during the pandemic, watching their follower numbers on Instagram and Twitter tick up over the months of last summer.

Still, even if locked-down isolation is part of hyperpop’s DNA, it also means one of the only remaining questions on most of the artists’ lips is: ​“How famous am I really?”

Pronounced: glay-ve
Location: Hendersonville, North Carolina
Age: 16
Standout track: Astrid
How his grandparents would describe his music: ​“One of them said I sounded like Post Malone.”

Ash Gutierrez had a nomadic upbringing thanks to his professional polo-playing father. His family lived in South Carolina, Canada and New York, then settled in North Carolina when Gutierrez was about nine years old.

Now, with his dad having retired from polo, Ash is the focus of the family. He has carved out his own career as hyperpop’s overnight celebrity – perhaps the youngest and fastest, since he only started making music under the name glaive in March of last year. The self-taught producer makes elliptical emo pop with a tone popularised by early ​’00s indie rockers. But it’s easy to see the injection of his pop forebears, including Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. ​“I’m a big fan of female pop singers,” he says. ​“They have the best voices in my opinion.”

Glaive’s songs are mostly about ​“being 16 and being annoyed or mad”. But as a family affair of sorts, Gutierrez knows he has a hit on his hands when it’s got the mum stamp of approval. ​“Normally, if I like the song and my mom likes the song, most people will like the song.” He’s gearing up for the release of an EP this year and, though he can’t yet legally drink, he’s looking forward to filling the beer-soaked floors at his first live show. ​“In the future, that’s a number one priority.”

Pronounced: pe-tal supp-lie
Location: Victoria, Canada
Age: 23
Standout track: Picture On My Screen
How her grandparents would describe her music: ​“Oh God. Literally noise.”

“When I see your picture on my screen/​And you’re smiling at me/It’s like you’re right here but/​I can’t have it,” Angelica Peddie sings on the dreamy Picture On My Screen, music that could populate a loading screen on a design-your-character anime multiplayer game.

The reason Peddie’s music as Petal Supply is so mercurial and mutative could be her linear working process. She writes and produces a song one section at a time, in order. ​“When I’m done with a section, I’ll just do something [completely different],” she explains. Her impulsive approach often results in a hooky, chop-change melody.

Though she has been releasing music and collaborating with artists like Himera since 2019, she still works part-time at a clothing store to pay the bills. ​“I don’t make a living off of Spotify,” she says with a shrug. ​“But it’s pocket money.” That will soon change, with a move planned to Toronto down the line. And more music. ​“I plan to release a lot of shit.”

Pronounced: see-em-ten
Location: Northern California
Age: 19
Standout track: NEVER MET! feat. Glitch Gum
How his grandparents would describe his music: ​“There’s a lot happening.”

CMTEN grew up singing and playing music as a follower of the Mormon faith. When he got a keyboard for Christmas in 2017, he began ​“messing around with [production software] Ableton.” His influences – bands like Temporex, Vampire Weekend and MGMT – have seeped into the swirl of trap metal, dubstep and downtempo indie he sings over with lyrics that he says ​“personify emotion”. Example: ​“Like an emo bitch on Tumblr I think I just need to get help.”

CMTEN quickly mushroomed from 80 monthly listeners on Spotify to more than a million when NEVER MET! went viral on TikTok, leading to a contract with Warner Records. He plans to release an EP in mid 2021. All the recognition is something not every suburban teen is used to – unless you’re in the hyperpop scene. ​“I’m 19, but I’m years older than these people that I’m listening to,” he says. ​“It doesn’t matter if you’re 11. Instead of putting time into Call of Duty, [we’re] messing around on FL Studio and making really good music.”

Pronounced: gup-pee
Location: Florida
Age: 22
Standout track: Modest
How his grandparents would describe his music: ​“Very fascinating.”

Spencer Hawk grew up in San Diego and moved to Boston after graduation to study music production. He listened to ​“boring average rock bro music” like Foo Fighters and the Guitar Hero soundtrack. That inspired him to start playing around with Garageband. ​“It’s fun to mess around on the computer when you’re small,” he says.

What bothers Hawk most is being associated with his famous father, the skate and video game legend Tony Hawk. ​“I’ve lived an insanely privileged life,” he admits, ​“so much so that it disgusts me sometimes. But I can’t control my parents’ finances. I’m grateful.” His collaboration with Fraxiom, food house, only proves that as Gupi he has earned his keep as a spark plug of hyperpop. To boot, his secondhand experience of fame only helped when he walked into the real thing. ​“With food house getting big, it was easy for me to be desensitised to things because I’ve had such a surreal, weird life.”

With lines such as ride​’s ​“I go to Target CVS at night/​It is the only time I feel alive”, Hawk’s food house music thumbs a nose at consumerism by aping it with kitschy, brand-friendly lyrics. ​“I think there’s a lot of emotion in the music that comes from frustration about things, whether it be identity or world issues,” he says, adding, ​“It’s cool to see a new revolution of music.”