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First, an explanation

The world of music and the world of fashion are closely and constantly related. Although the pseudo-genre slash cultural moment of hyperpop relies on a heavy dose of irony and an embrace of the corny, cheesy, and unexpected, its use of a carefully curated online aesthetic creates a perfect opportunity to embrace high fashion alongside its music.

Sonic pioneers that helped to shape the sound of hyperpop like Arca and the late SOPHIE have been called upon numerous times by fashion houses to model and star in campaigns. SOPHIE, in particular, played a huge role in French fashion brand Louis Vuitton's Spring-Summer 2020 runway show, with the "It's Okay To Cry" music video serving as a backdrop for their models on the catwalk. A browse of Arca's Instagram page boasts a number of brand collaborations, the artist's stunning face in campaigns for Ray-Ban, Bottega Veneta, Loewe, and Calvin Klein.

Hyperpop mother Charli XCX has been a frequent New York Fashion Week patron since she's been in the music industry, and was even a first-time attendee in 2020 to the Met Gala. Charli pushes boundaries both sonically and aesthetically, which makes her an ideal candidate for coverage by Vogue, campaigns for luxury lingerie brand Agent Provocateur, Ray-Ban, and Venezuelan fashion designer Carolina Herrera.

There's a huge vein to mine here. Shygirl is a muse for Burberry, and frankly outshines professional model Kendall Jenner in a shared campaign photoshoot. Bladee and Ecco2k have lent their faces to collaborations with Marc Jacob's Heaven brand and the catwalk for luxury brand Alyx, respectively. Alice Longyu Gao was invited and styled by Dior for the opening of their Designer of Dreams exhibition at the Brooklyn museum. Angelus modeled for French brand Joel Mank.

Of course, any music style that intends to subvert the very ideals of what make a popstar will include intense visual curation. "The look" is an essential part of any musician's branding and success. Hyperpop, which blends the unserious and the very serious, is also heavily influenced by rap music, another genre with close ties to fashion. There is a very real fashion culture within this community, and I hope to explore it fully in upcoming columns.

It's my aspiration that this monthly column will provide coverage, analysis, and interviews with artists and stylists creating the fashion landscape of hyperpop. There's a lot to tackle, so join me each month with a new edition of Hautepop here at Ringtone.

About the columnist

I'm a Kansas-City based music journalist with a heavy interest in fashion that stems from watching Project Runway at a very early age. My own style is highly influenced by the artists I listen to, so I feel it's only fair to really dig into their aesthetics and impact.

I have been wanting to write about the intersection of hyperpop and the fashion world for a long time, so I am very grateful for the opportunity to write this column. If you have any interview requests, topics for coverage, or questions, don't be afraid to shoot me an email at allisonharris028@gmail.com or reach out to Ringtone at ringtonemagazine@gmail.com. See you next month!

Yours,
Allison

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Hautepop: A Hyperpop Fashion Column - 10/31/21

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The world of music and the world of fashion are closely and constantly related. Although the pseudo-genre slash cultural moment of hyperpop relies on a heavy dose of irony and an embrace of the corny, cheesy, and unexpected, its use of a carefully curated online aesthetic creates a perfect opportunity to embrace high fashion alongside its music.

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What is hyperpop and how to recreate a look with jewels

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What is hyperpop and how to recreate a look with jewels

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What is hyperpop and how to recreate a look with jewels

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The Gen-Z aesthetic inspired by the digital world in the new Pandora ME collection

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It's a blistering afternoon in Ibiza, and the sun feels laser-trained on the Hard Rock Hotel, where the International Music Summit is taking place. The lobby bustles with sun-splotched Balearic veterans, the mirrored sunglass lenses of industry heads glinting as they mingle in and out of panels and workshops on everything from diversifying line-ups to CDJ advancements. The hotel pool heaves with sprightly Ibiza revellers, posters for David Guetta and Calvin Harris residencies loom on the aqua skyline, and a syncopated beat thrums from the soundcheck going on for tonight's shows. It feels like the epicentre of classic club culture and archetypal hedonistic raving, so it's slightly jarring, then, to be meeting an avant-pop juggernaut like SOPHIE in among the scrum, and we tell her such.

"That's one of the reasons I was intrigued to come here," SOPHIE, the Scottish-born, LA-based musician and producer says. After a few attempts to find a quiet spot, we perch on a patio set outside some ground floor hotel apartments, and talk over iced coffees that she insists on buying for us. "I love the format of big room DJ shows, high-quality soundsystems and production values - there's an experience like no other in the European clubs that makes you stay well into the next day's afternoon. It's definitely appealing to me as I consider my own work," she tells us.

SOPHIE's comfort zone is defined by the uncomfortable. She's most dynamic when faced with contrast and new experience, which plays out across her creative and career trajectory. "I do tend to make those opportunities for myself where possible," she says, laughing softly. She recalls her first real 'SOPHIE' gig, with about five people present, where one came up and put their middle finger in her face: "The right person was there to hear me though, so it was alright." Whether navigating today's 'beefa' experience, or early in her career, when she had to deal with dance music's stale disdain for her and experimental label PC Music's forward-thinking, pop-pranging sounds, SOPHIE has refused to yield.

"I first caught a very tiny snippet of a SOPHIE soundcheck in 2011," says Andrew Thomson, head honcho at Huntleys + Palmers. The Scottish label released the artist's first remix and debut release, 2013's taut, glittering electro-house number 'NOTHING MORE TO SAY', which would have come out earlier and the wider world would have met SOPHIE sooner if, according to Thomson, distribution hadn't been as slow. "It was enough to pique my intrigue," he adds of his first SOPHIE experience, "and I promptly approached her for the remix, which subsequently led to a now-infamous beach party at OFFSónar later that year, where a completely unknown SOPHIE absolutely smashed it with a live set of fully-formed hits. Back then I was impressed with her confidence, and it came as absolutely no surprise that I would see her perform on the huge stage at the real Sónar in only a matter of years. To see her in the studio with Rihanna was more of an affirmation than a surprise - a matter of when, rather than if. As thrilling as it has been to watch until now, I feel like the best is yet to come, which is even more exciting."

Dropping her bracing, carbonated pop sounds in 2013, which culminated in the celebrated 'PRODUCT' compilation album in 2015, SOPHIE led a new wave that obliterated all the old guard held dear - disorientating, saccharine tracks like 'BIPP' and 'Lemonade', paired with the unbridled 'Hard', blurred the boundaries of electronic music and its ideals. "When she sent us 'BIPP', I smiled for about a month," says Calum, who plays as Spencer and runs Scottish label Numbers. Over a few months, they went back and forth on micro-edits. "When an artist has such clear and exciting ideas, it's a pleasure to help refine them.

The collaboration on these records was built on respect and trust, but was also about doing something different, ignoring the old moulds of 'dance music', and instead focusing on being interesting, new and exciting. It wasn't trying to be pop, but it was a huge influence - you can hear it. "The marriage of sound design, songwriting and hooks is so refreshing to me across all of her productions," Calum continues. "At first, I thought she used to sound like equal parts Hudson Mohawke, Pet Shop Boys and Autechre in a boiling pot, but now, I'm unsure if there's anyone that sounds like SOPHIE. We're proud to be part of the family, and I doubt there will be another artist on our roster that we will drop everything to set up a silicone 'product' factory in the Gorbals [a Glaswegian neighbourhood] for."

Urgent, spiky themes of consuming and the consumer play out in her meta-textual early world, transposed to real life with 'Lemonade' sound-tracking a McDonald's advertisement. "There was an interesting dialogue at that time about authenticity," reiterates SOPHIE. When she was less visible, and with little biographical info out there, questions loomed over her gender, and the intentions behind the PC Music movement she was an affiliate of, with its ad-jingle hooks and branded aesthetics. "It was valuable to talk about the authenticity of creators coming from various backgrounds to inhabit underground spaces," she says. "The people of PC Music were really my people, and it was an informed wave that happened, something we cared about a lot." The collective looked women-led - Hannah Diamond, GFOTY - and playfully stretched feminine caricatures: bubbly, hyper-commercial sounds, bug-eyed pop princesses posing against primary colours, twinkly voices over juddering beats. "We wanted to open up this space, and it definitely provoked a lot of useful conversations."

Then came her ascension from a relentlessly mythologised, anonymous producer fronting a pulsating micro scene to the ultimate apex of pop, with last year's 'It's Okay To Cry' video. It stood as SOPHIE's first appearance and vocal debut, and confirmation of her existence as a trans woman; a new era of SOPHIE that reached for vulnerability and transcendent beauty. "Is that a teardrop in your eye?" she asks in song, hands running through a halo of auburn curls in the stunning self-directed visual. "Becoming more visible was what felt comfortable to me at the time, as it felt like a challenge, opening up this new space for myself and others consequently to inhabit in music." The narrative had formed around the musician that equated her anonymity with a calculated personal brand but, she tells us, that was never her intention despite the mythology constructed around her by others.

"Initially I was quite alright with letting the music speak for itself, but then the problem is, people start filling in the gaps for you," she says. "In some ways I was happy about that - it allows you a certain amount of privacy. Then again, you might want to have more of a directive on certain parts." With her press-frenzy inauguration and relentless rumination on her identity came dispirit, particularly at the "amount of nonsense" in how the media handles gender. "Much of the talk of trans issues by the press is serving other people's agendas," she says, getting the closest to fierce we've seen her. "I experienced how tightly bound that influence is on the public. With such narrow paths for identity and output, you're funnelled down to represent these narrow issues. It became quite restricting, in what was meant to be liberating. It was exposing, having an image tied to an old circus. I have to re-contextualise and reconsider my art in other ways, to take back the narrative."

Her creative metamorphosis continued as an ethereal amphibian-nymph, perched on a slab of granite by milky water on the cover of her 2018 debut album 'Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides'. It's a record that challenges the binaries of what pop and underground music is, of gender, and what both our bodies and sonics can do, a record that topped DJ Mag's albums of the year list too. "Artificial bloom / hydroponic skin / chemical release / synthesise the real," 'Faceshopping' spits over juddering beats, celestial hooks sparring with abrasive pitch shifts. 'Ponyboy' is caustically sexual with its bulbous bassline, while effervescent pop banger 'Immaterial' and distorted, metallic 'Whole New World' encapsulate SOPHIE's contrasting interests in artifice and the organic, the body and machine, identity and brand.

"I want to live in that strange, amorphous zone of discomfort, when it's facilitating exactly what I want to make and achieve with my music," she says, letting words form slowly on her rosebud lips. SOPHIE takes her time with each question, cupping her pointed chin, sharp cheekbones that rise across pearly skin in startling Ophelia beauty. Unafraid of long silences, she ponders and chooses her words carefully - budget airline planes power noisily through the sky above us, punctuating our conversation, but they don't disturb her. She's a Virgo, a star sign that she tells us defines many of the musicians and producers she knows and respects - observant, intense, detail oriented. "I think I'm in a weird place," she offers, with confidence and playful curiosity, rather than the feelings of worry or confusion many would correlate with the 'weird'. "My early music was quite rooted in UK dance music, and then it became more pop-focused after spending more time in the US, and now it's ended up in a more experimental place that doesn't fit comfortably in any existing system."

SOPHIE's work traverses slippery hyper-pop and experimental electronics, stretched apart and reworked by a latex-gloved hand. 'Oil Of Every Pearl...' oscillates across curated, aerated eclecticism, pulling together SOPHIE's impressive technical prowess - all of her sounds are made from scratch - and her knowledge of expansive, genre-refuting sonic scapes. It's blazed across the stage of London's Fabric and DIY spaces in Glasgow, European warehouses, US superclubs, and will tonight at an iconic Ibiza spot in a rare b2b with French producer Agoria. They've only met once at Coachella, but she's excited to see what they can do together.

A keen collaborator, SOPHIE has transcended from her early pop avatar project QT with PC Music founder AG Cook to studio sessions with Charli XCX, Madonna and Rihanna alike, and signed to Jay-Z's Roc Nation in a major swing at the mainstream music industry. She is imminently releasing music with German pop-bop princess Kim Petras, a "dream partnership". Speaking of their joint project, Petras says SOPHIE is "one of a kind... She's driving a completely new genre that I think a lot of underground kids can really relate to. I think it means the world to them. Honestly, no one does it like SOPHIE."

SOPHIE also tells us of the sprawling amount of collabs that have yet to see the light of day being kept under wraps. But for the time being, she's focused on the next transfiguration of SOPHIE, ready to crescendo and climax into the next phase.

"I'm at a point now where I want to reassess what's going on, and I'm interested to know how much I feel I would need to compromise on my values of how music should sound, what areas it should touch on, to fit into this kind of world," she says. "I want to go into the clubs and experience it, have an audience's perspective for the first time in a long time." Her first experience of music and clubbing came early, rootling through rave cassettes of her half-brother's and dad's at just seven-years-old. "I would be transported to a new dimension," she says fondly. "I loved sci-fi, I was obsessed with aliens, and those cerebral sounds of Kraftwerk and Orbital merged with that. I would play them on my toy keyboard until I could go see them for myself." Age 10, she went to her first festival, a ravey event in Scotland, and as a teenager, she visited a half-sister - another raver, naturally - in Lanzarote, where she ended up DJing in bars and at a wedding.

Back in Scotland, SOPHIE's life was more isolated. "I had to create my own experiences, build on the response I had rather than anything going on around me." Music in her house had two contrasting experiences - her mother's love of disco brought warmth to their home, but her father was distant through her childhood, only really connecting with her through festivals and clubbing. Going to art school to study sculpture, she found herself drawn to contemporary multidisciplinary artist Matthew Barney's transworldly, body-centric aesthetics, and themes of the superhuman and depraved. "From when I was young, I was able to form my own loose fantasy, find my zone, and what resonated with me." Music has always offered an escape, and offsets powerful, profound memories: "I remember falling in love, and connecting it to the Spice Girls' '2 Become 1'. I was young, trying to flirt, though I didn't really know it," she laughs.

Her previous album felt like an interpersonal conversation with a younger self, getting in touch with her more intimate, sincere, human experiences. "I worked with my brother who I discovered so much music with," she explains. "We had these conversations that referenced really obscure psy-trance tapes that were so important to us. We were able to touch on quite personal references, which I wouldn't be able to share with anyone else. I'm allowing early rave stuff and those memories to be pretty influential for my new record." Mostly, SOPHIE uses the Elektron Monomachine and Ableton Live to make music, building her instrumentals from waveforms, rather than traditional sampling, to form an expansive personal library. To her, it's like sculpture, with all the materials, textures and forms at her fingertips.

"It is so important for queer people, and for anyone making music that's deemed to be somehow alternative or inaccessible. They shouldn't be made to feel like their identities are not mainstream, or to be marginalised just through genre and categories. I think it's really important to break down those binaries, and not feel that because you are making 'weird' music, that you are a 'weird' person"

Her first sampler came from a friend of her dad's in Spain, and it was bitty, difficult work that informed her developing production skills, using small sequences and writing music around them. She still uses her first mono machine, her "magic little black box", says her girlfriend and manager, Tzef Montana, who is sitting nearby as we chat. "SOPHIE can turn anywhere into a studio." "Not that that's always to your taste!" says SOPHIE, the two exchanging a giggle and quick cigarettes, smoke wisping between them. "But seriously, an AirBnB, a bathroom, a hallway," says Montana. "She'll bring people into her studio or wherever she's making do, and people in the know will always ask to see the black box, like her little party trick."

SOPHIE has been slowly transposing her work method to exclusively use a Mac and accompanying software instruments, but will still find inspiration in the sounds of the natural world, before attempting to recreate them synthetically. "I've been working on a song recently that's inspired by this swing I was on in Australia. It creaked a lot, and I could feel the resistance in my body with each swing. I couldn't stop thinking about the sound, so I went back with my machine and tried to synthesise the effect." That ethic illustrates itself in her back-catalogue - the puckering of latex, the rabid sigh of helium, a squelching patent heel on a sticky dancefloor. "We'll be at the beach just chilling out, and she gets a stone, and throws it again and again, just to hear the 'plop'," says Montana with light exasperation.

Refusing to capitulate in any spectrum, SOPHIE is re-examining her live experience too. Her Fabric show last year was a monstrous, hypersexual cabaret of a live performance that saw SOPHIE flanked by dancers in latex and leather, whereas her DJ sets are mostly her original music - testing new, as-of-yet-unreleased material - pocked with leftfield choices, from hard dance to Kate Bush vocal snippets. "I'm still experimenting with exactly how I think an electronic music performance can or should be conducted," she says. "I've tried a few different configurations, but I think I'm finally getting closer with the latest work I've done.

She says she "felt oppressed" by the strict format, as a performer, that a DJ has to navigate, tired of performing in a "standard DJ way", behind the turntables. "I was envious of performers in pop or even old rock; taking their guitars to the front of the stage and having a real interaction with the crowd, free to move around, and use their bodies," she says. "My challenge has always been moving away from the table, while having the same control, flexibility and stability in my sound. I can't believe nobody else feels the same restrictions. Being hidden, rooted to the spot, with your body language un-engaging, looking down - that sucks." SOPHIE points to EDM DJs such as Steve Aoki or Swedish House Mafia who get up on the tables, jumping, hands in the air. "I'm trying to find that perfect in-between."

The questions and challenges SOPHIE continues to put to herself are present across our conversation, illustrated in a transparent, expansive thought process etched on her contemplative face. She talks of more pop collaborations and studio production, speaking frequently of the push-pull in compromising sound or message, of resources and the economic viability of self-funding to make her shows how she wants them to be, with frustration. "I'm here through persistence," SOPHIE says with conviction, "through being really strong in my perspective, and being able to converse - arguing in conversations, or in the language of music, and letting it make its own point. I am about nurturing your music, protecting it, so it has a strong enough shell - when you bring it out into the world, if you're playing it to crowds, it can fend for itself. My ideas have to feel strong enough in themselves that they can protect themselves in the outside world."

In an IMS panel later that day on club culture, she highlights some of the issues around corporate investment, and the problems of budgets for artists wishing to work in a more avant-garde way in a commercial clubbing world. As her stratospheric rise continues, SOPHIE is well aware of the reckoning she has to do with the bulky industry machine. "I have to be specific about what I want, and navigate these tensions effectively," SOPHIE says. "I need to somehow streamline everything, retake control over it, it's something I'm working on every day. I think anyone claiming that they are limited in their ambitions to be underground is just selling themselves short," she says matter-of-factly.

"I think if you are going into music, you aim to communicate with the largest group possible, and you don't want to segregate people by exclusively appealing to a niche. Really, it's a nice fantasy to do it all without compromising your core values, that's the real challenge. "We're in an era where we're recalculating what's considered mainstream and underground," she continues. "Ibiza-type DJs - that is a mainstream route of its own now, a huge industry, a huge culture, a huge fan-base worldwide. The mainstream has pockets and nuances that sometimes get ignored. Everyone is trying to find the right formula to have enough control, and to not compromise on their values."

Though it's still a divisive topic in hot take-ridden dance music discourse - from Instagram-branded partnerships to corporate investments in festivals - commerciality is something SOPHIE continues to meditate on, looking to the poptimism and irreverence to underground traditional values that she sees in her fans for direction. "Young people don't make that distinction between pop music and so-called underground music anymore," she affirms. "I always just saw young people ignoring those binaries and being the most interested in what makes them feel a different way. We shouldn't have to align with these seemingly polar opposite groups, make these alliances or niches. You can appreciate certain aspects of underground culture, and you can despise certain aspects. It's yours to pick and choose."

Becoming more pop prominent in the age of 'stan' culture, SOPHIE has garnered a passionate fandom that rivals even that of Peggy Gou's. Look into the nebulous crowd at one of her shows and you'll see a glorious celebration of today's queer youth - drag babies, club kids, BDSM queens. It's one of the reasons that she sees her mainstream success as bolstering as it is. "It is so important for queer people, and for anyone making music that's deemed to be somehow alternative or inaccessible," she says. "They shouldn't be made to feel like their identities are not mainstream, or to be marginalised just through genre and categories. I think it's really important to break down those binaries, and not feel that because you are making 'weird' music, that you are a 'weird' person. To create those bridges is possible, it's one of the most important things for artists to do." With a dedicated fan-base that feels marginalised and unrepresented comes weighty responsibility that has, SOPHIE says, been emotionally corrosive.

"I have to constantly ground myself and realise I'm only really responsible for my own wellbeing," she asserts. "You can't take that weight on full time. Sometimes, it's enough just to be yourself and be comfortable in you. Do I feel some kind of responsibility? Yes of course, but I try to ignore that and focus on what feels right to me, first of all. And I think only by doing that, can I actually be responsible for other people, for those queer kids coming to the shows or listening, wherever they are." In a moment of shared, agreeable silence, she reaches down to fiddle with her shoe lace, running a pale finger across her ankle to unstick her sock from her leg in the Ibiza humidity. "And a tip for the trans girls out there," she says in a coy aside, pointing to her shin-high combat boots. "Doc Martens." In a current state of flux, SOPHIE has a backlog of a whole album and more's worth of material, one that she has tested on her fans with shows, but feels she's already outgrowing.

"I've toured it all without it being released - it gave great performance, but I've already gone too fast. I feel like I've definitely moved even beyond those ideas now." But not to worry, there's more - with her next epoch, SOPHIE hopes to tear down the industry-imposed deism on her image, and the narrative imposed on her as both a visible artist and a trans woman. "I'm moving past that feeling of being empowered in a revolutionary way on the last album. It's something, for sanity's sake, I needed to reel back."

It's all about staying grounded; amid the work with global pop stars, sound-tracking Gucci shows and February's Grammy nomination, she's getting back to keeping her artistry at large, rather than uber-image-focused, as she explores her next chapter. SOPHIE confirms hopes that this will culminate in a forthcoming album, one that's a collaborative work with pop-affronting "eye-catchers" and "relatable" earworms. "I want to normalise myself and my ideas - I'm making music about connection, feeling good, it's personable and down to earth: very simple themes are important to me right now. I needed music to serve that purpose, for the me now, and the me next."

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Dedicated to breaking down cultural binaries and taking on the music industry juggernaut, SOPHIE has obliterated the lines between underground dance music and commerical pop. DJ Mag's Anna Cafolla meets her in Ibiza to talk artifice and authenticity, and a new era of live performance

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SOPHIE just serenaded the audience at Louis Vuitton’s SS20 show

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SOPHIE just serenaded the audience at Louis Vuitton’s SS20 show

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SOPHIE just serenaded the audience at Louis Vuitton’s SS20 show

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Set against a cosmic backdrop, the Scottish producer’s performance was screened whilst models showed off Nicolas Ghesquiere’s latest LV collection

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SOPHIE's New Remix Album Comes as a Clutch

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SOPHIE's New Remix Album Comes as a Clutch

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Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2020 Fashion Show

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Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2020 Fashion Show

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Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2020 Fashion Show

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How Shygirl Became The Centrepiece Of Burberry’s AW21 Presentation

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How Shygirl Became The Centrepiece Of Burberry’s AW21 Presentation

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How Shygirl Became The Centrepiece Of Burberry’s AW21 Presentation

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The British musician gave a performance to remember

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She's so f ancy ...you already know.

Charli XCX loves to have fun with fashion - and where other stars have shied away from camp, she's always been one to full-on embrace it. So, naturally, the "1999" singer brought her A-game to the 2019 Met Gala in NYC.

It was her first time attending the annual star-studded event, but Charli, 26, looked right at home on the red carpet. And for good reason, given that she was dressed by Jean Paul Gaultier for the big night. She wore a dramatic, neon yellow-green confection from the French designer's spring 2019 couture collection, which she and stylist Rebecca Grice paired with embellished Jimmy Choo heels in a similarly sunny shade. A pair of stunning Beladora diamond earrings topped off her look, fashion-wise - but the sparkle didn't stop there.

Even Charli's manicure was iced out, with a bedazzled accent nail on each hand courtesy of manicurist Eri Ishizu (really, if there's any time to rock extravagant nail art, this was it). With the rest of her digits neutral and gemstone-free, Charli's mani may have actually been the most subtle part of her look. Hairstylist Tina Outen and makeup artist Emi Kaneko were responsible for the finishing touches, matching the hot pink tips of her hair to her equally bright eyeshadow. The result? A two-toned highlighter-hued look that was downright striking. And, of course, it was camp.
RELATED: See Every Outrageous Red Carpet Look from the 2019 Met Gala
Charli took us behind the scenes as she got ready for fashion's big night out. Click through for her exclusive photo diary - Champagne included.

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Charli XCX Met Gala Getting Ready Diary - Behind-the-Scenes Photos

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She's so f ancy ...you already know. Charli XCX loves to have fun with fashion - and where other stars have shied away from camp, she's always been one to full-on embrace it. So, naturally, the "1999" singer brought her A-game to the 2019 Met Gala in NYC.

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Roma Radz always dreamed of being a pop star, the type that stans obsess over, quoting their queen's song lyrics in adoring Insta posts - she just never thought becoming one herself was achievable. "The way I was brought up, it was 'try and follow a career path, think what you're going to do', so pursuing music was never in my brain," the 20-year-old says.

Coming from a quiet UK county like Ipswich in Suffolk stunted a young Roma's artistic ambition, who grew up in awe of Lady Gaga and Marina, formerly known as Marina and the Diamonds. "It's just small-town normal jobs, so thinking you can get into music is kind of crazy," she considers, adding that going online helped her find "a whole community of kids who were obsessed with non-mainstream pop music".

Escaping to London to study fashion at Middlesex University in 2017 sparked her suppressed creativity. Two years later, a course-required work placement led her to an internship and friendship with PC Music popstar Hannah Diamond (HD had studied the same course years earlier). Roma was a fan of her music, having discovered Hannah Diamond's 2013 track " Pink and Blue" - a maximalist redefining of "pop" that kickstarted the hugely influential early-2010s hyperpop movement which was pioneered by SOPHIE, A. G. Cook and the PC crew and later influenced US scene-leaders 100 gecs, umru and Dorian Electra.

After sending her CV, Roma became Miss HD's photography assistant, helping out on shoots with hyperpop-affiliated artists including Charli XCX. It was exciting, but Roma also wanted to be the centre of attention. When Hannah suggested Roma become a pop star for her final-year uni project, also inviting her to join a European and UK tour as her DJ, CD-Romz, everything clicked into place.

Roma's tutors were sceptical, but she didn't care. She ended up writing a dissertation about herself and created the glossy self-starring Y2K-inspired Hello Kitty-featuring music video for what would become her debut single, the bubblegum cute-pop banger "Boyfriend In Every City", released in May 2020. Two months later, she released "Like Magic" - a candy-coated early-2000s twinkling pop throwback complete with a sugar rush chorus that would've topped the chart had it been released by Carly Rae Jepsen. She also bagged a first class degree.

Roma's happy with the small fanbase she's built - alongside her collaborators phonewifey, Worldwide Princess, Mattu and Nathalie Mac (who produced her third single, "Really In Love") - but is hopeful that her upcoming debut EP will result in her own legion of stans. VICE caught up with her to talk about where she fits into the UK hyperpop scene and why she can't wait to perform live.

Where do you think Roma Radz fits into it?
I feel like the basic bitch of the scene! But I just want to make pop music. I even question how well I fit into it as the trends within the genre itself are constantly changing and evolving. It's just a constant chain of evolution. Hyperpop fans are so crazy that once you are seen as a hyperpop artist, anyone you collab with or feature automatically gets put into the hyperpop bracket too.

That's why it's good to be a part of this scene because people won't find out about you if you're not in a scene.I'd rather 100 people be obsessed with me than 1,000 casually know my name. I want people that are invested in me and would listen to me every single day.

Hyperpop isn't really that niche anymore, so I don't think it's shocking to me that people everywhere listen to it. PC Music was niche but, through the evolution of artists being inspired by PC, [the sound] has widened so far out that parts of almost every music genre can be found within hyperpop.

What are the main differences between the US and UK scene?
The main difference is that, in the US, they don't know as much about the PC Music influence. And I think some people get confused by autotune. Lots of autotune doesn't necessarily equal hyperpop. Or does it? But I feel like that's a whole other conversation. Also, I feel like it's the producers who really own and run the US hyperpop scene. In the UK, I don't think the producers get as much glorification - it's the singers. The US scene is also influenced more by emo-rap than pop music - stuff like Lil Peep, Bladee and Yung Lean.

What's coming next from Roma Radz?
I'm working on the release of my debut EP but it's been pushed back. Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic isn't helping as I can't work with people IRL, but my mental state has been holding me back a lot. I feel like there's so much pressure and competition within this scene that I feel anxious most of the time leading up to releasing anything new. But I just have to push through that and believe in myself more!

After that, I want each project to be a different era. I don't want to be trapped in a box, because I haven't tried everything yet. And, like everybody, I just want to get out there. If COVID wasn't a thing, maybe I could have done my own singing shows. Now, I feel like I'm totally ready. I can't show the fun performance side of me when I'm alone in my bedroom!

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Hyperpop is a Movement, Says PC Music Affiliate Roma Radz

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Roma Radz always dreamed of being a pop star, the type that stans obsess over, quoting their queen's song lyrics in adoring Insta posts - she just never thought becoming one herself was achievable. "The way I was brought up, it was 'try and follow a career path, think what you're going to do', so pursuing music was never in my brain," the 20-year-old says.

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Hyperpop has shot to critical acclaim over the last year, but how did it get started?

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Why is Hyperpop and PC Music so inherently queer?

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Why is Hyperpop and PC Music so inherently queer?

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"I'm not queer, I've simply been in love with the genre for the past couple of years, so take everything I say with a pinch of salt.

I think one reason queer artists and fans are drawn to this genre is the juxtaposition of super industrial, intense, distorted drums that sound traditionally "masculine" and the cute, bubbly, melodies that sound traditionally "feminine." Additionally, I think the genre encourages experimentation and expression more than other genres, something that queer people may be yearning for as they grow up?"

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r/pcmusic - Why is Hyperpop and PC Music so inherently queer?

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327 votes and 66 comments so far on Reddit

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how sophie radically changed the music industry

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how sophie radically changed the music industry

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"It's not supposed to make you feel good, it's just supposed to make you feel," one kid, no older than 16, shouts into a friend's ear. It's about 11pm on a Tuesday at gay club Heaven, and Sophie's first performance in London since her return is drawing to a close. The stage is empty and mechanical, unthinking noises and lasers have filled the room for the last 10 minutes, but the energy emitting from the audience isn't close to dropping. The crowd is made up of young, gender-fluid dressed-up kids with elaborate makeup, big grins, and dilated pupils. A club synonymous with a different era of gay nightlife vivified by a new, queer genesis. When Sophie returns to the stage to finish her set with affecting new power ballad It's Okay to Cry, exhilaration begets emotion and the mood crescendos to a triumphant, visceral close.

A week later Sophie is arched awkwardly over a chair at the back of the Hackney Picturehouse café, wearing a puffa jacket, pink jeans and bright pink lipstick. "Anything musically you do should provoke something," she says, on mention of feeling vs. feeling good. "I've always tried to measure what I put out by whether it elicits a response. Often in my career it's elicited a negative response, but I think that's fine as well." Having dismissed the first question - "Did you enjoy the performance?" - as the least relevant thing about the show, Sophie is more enthusiastic talking about the crowd instead. "That's really the audience I'm interested in communicating with - not 'only', but definitely the main focus of my interests. Playing to a crowd who are so free of inhibitions, wanting to have experiences that can actually change something fundamental in the way that people want to live."

Sophie emerged about five years ago, as an affiliate and friend of the label PC Music and its founder A.G. Cook. Much of the "negative response" she mentioned can be attributed to the divisive reaction this music garnered. "PC Music: the future of pop or 'contemptuous parody'?" The Guardian asked in May 2015. "Is it time to pull the plug on PC Music?" VICE asked a year later. Creators of synthetic pastiches of internet culture, capitalism and consumerism, the hyperactive, distorted sound quickly grew in infamy and, by the time they broke into the mainstream, at front and centre was PRODUCT - Sophie's debut compilation album. "I felt really excited about PC Music mostly because they were all friends of mine. They were the first people I really connected with who made music. I was excited to be part of something that felt like a breakaway from this constant recycling of dance music genres that was going on at the time."

"There were so many women involved in PC Music, and it was a really collaborative atmosphere. It didn't have the macho feel of a lot of the dance music that I was experiencing at that time."

Love it or hate it, in eight short songs Sophie helped spark a seismic shift in chart music: pop culture processed through underground sounds, with gender equality at its core. "There were so many women involved in PC Music, it was a really collaborative atmosphere. It didn't have the macho feel of a lot of stuff I was experiencing at that time." Throughout this period, Sophie remained closely guarded about her own identity. Interviews were rare and social media interactions few. What little coverage there was attributed different gender pronouns to Sophie, evidence of how little was known and understood about her as a person. The confusion at this point remains a topic Sophie isn't interested in discussing, but since returning late last year with new solo music, she has explored fresh ground, using her own vocals, appearing in her own videos and singing live on stage.

"I think the only way you can judge things is by what feels good to you, and not forced, and right now it feels natural to me to do this stuff - to be in the spotlight," she says, beating her coffee spoon rapidly on the table, before dropping it and apologizing. This tension between being a performer and a private person is addressed in two of Sophie's three new releases. "Spit on my face / Put the pony in his place" goes Ponyboy; a fierce, sexually-liberated track accompanied by BDSM-style choreography on stage. "My face is the front of shop / My face is the real shop front / My shop is the face I front / I'm real when I shop my face" - is the motorized refrain of Faceshopping, an obvious contemplation of what true identity really is. "It's about asking what's an authentic way of presenting yourself. Is it through the caricature you make of yourself online, through Instagram? Is that really a more honest way of expressing yourself?" The subtext is, very much, no.

What seems to prevail through Sophie's artistry is a desire to create a safe, welcoming community among her listeners, something she struggled to find herself when she was younger. "I want to create spaces that would allow for that kind of expression to take place; free, musical, decadent spaces. Not decadent in a material way, but decadent in terms of complete freedom of expression. I was trying to find spaces like that, going to places like Berghain, seeing how they existed, but they were rooted in something that didn't seem to interact with pop culture in a way that interested me." The new iteration of her live performance seems to bridge this gap, but Sophie wouldn't say it was inspired by the queer nightlife of either Berlin or London. "I've never really been particularly into karaoke-style performance or a drag race style thing. That's not an influence on me. I've always dreamt of creating some sort of community atmosphere, which is queer, fluid, diverse, genderless, dynamic... I guess I felt like a lot of the culture around club nights in London was very macho when I started doing music. I did want to bring something different, to try and open up a different space for people." Looking around the room last Tuesday, it seems like she's achieved just that.

This desire has led Sophie to make Los Angeles her home for the past two and a half years, somewhere she looks forward to returning to soon. "I think there is an openness and acceptance there that I haven't found as much of elsewhere. My friends in LA, and the community there, are accepting and invested in the conversations. It also just allows me time and space to work, and there are so many people I can be inspired by." Surrounded by some of the industry's biggest artists, many of whom she's working with, it makes total sense. "I just feel good in LA," Sophie finishes with, peacefully. Not that it's all about feeling good, as a wise kid once said.

Credits

Photography Lea Colombo
Styling Emilie Kareh

Hair Cyndia Harvey at Streeters. Make-up Niamh Quinn at LGA using Chanel Les Beiges Tinted Moisturiser. Photography assistance David Mannion. Styling assistance Camille Marchand. Hair assistance Blake Henderson. Makeup assistance Libby James.
This article originally appeared on i-D UK.

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how sophie radically changed the music industry

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"It's not supposed to make you feel good, it's just supposed to make you feel," one kid, no older than 16, shouts into a friend's ear. It's about 11pm on a Tuesday at gay club Heaven, and Sophie's first performance in London since her return is drawing to a close.

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PC Music's Twisted Electronic Pop: A User's Manual

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PC Music's Twisted Electronic Pop: A User's Manual

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What is PC Music? A label, a scene, a subgenre, a red herring? It may be all of these things at once. The shadowy operation and its bewildering brand of hyper-pop have been everywhere in the past few months, from UK broadcasters like Rinse FM to the XL Records roster to Boiler Room broadcasts, and its influence seems to be growing on a daily basis.

The label, and the aesthetic it promulgates, have been hiding in plain sight for nearly a year and a half, releasing a steady stream of music- all online and mostly free- that amounts to one of the freshest, funniest, and most confounding pop-music phenomena to appear in a long time.

One example of PC Music's recent overground activities is a remix of How To Dress Well's "Repeat Pleasure" by A. G. Cook, the collective's founder and apparent ringleader. Released last week, it writhes like a wad of cellophane, multi-tracked voices shifting pitch as though propelled by some weird, subatomic impulse.

The remix tells us a lot about the marvelous strangeness of Cook's approach. Who else would take an evidently heartfelt song like "Repeat Pleasure"-a blue-eyed soul ditty that brings to mind Iron and Wine or maybe Duncan Sheik-and treat it like a Shrinky Dink? Cook, a sort of poster boy for digital artifice in the pop underground, is the last person we'd expect to involve himself with a project as heart-on-its-sleeve sincere as How To Dress Well.

This is the power of PC Music. The upstart British label is capable of absorbing virtually any influence and making it a part of its own warped pop totality.

Many details of the label- if it can be called a label- are unclear, including just how many people are involved. There's Daniel Harle, Cook's partner in the duo Dux Content, and Hannah Diamond, a singer and imagemaker behind LOGO Magazine, an online publication whose ultra-glossy, hyper-virtual aesthetic dovetails with PC Music's. The rest of the roster is a rogue's gallery of aliases, avatars, red herrings, and unknown quantities like GFOTY, easyFun, Princess Bambi, Lipgloss Twins, Kane West, and Thy Slaughter, each turning out variations on the same set of slick, chirpy, unhinged chart-pop themes.

And then there's SOPHIE, an artist not directly affiliated with PC Music, but who frequently appears alongside PC Music artists in nightclubs, on mixshows, and, most recently, at Boiler Room. SOPHIE is currently the highest-profile artist associated with the crew; her two singles on Glasgow's Numbers label, "Bipp"/"Elle" and "Lemonade"/"Hard", are thrillingly efficient, if slightly more abstract, summations of the PC Music aesthetic. That aesthetic can be summed up as a grab bag of metallic pings, rubbery zoings, helium-soaked Chipmunk vocals, trance stabs, airhorns, hardstyle kick drums, happy hardcore, Eskibeat, K-pop, J-Pop, vocaloid, 8-bit, black MIDI, 808s and Heartbreak, the Windows 95 startup chime, and a healthy dose of James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual for good measure.

So far, much of the discourse around SOPHIE and PC Music has concentrated on its self-consciously kawaii qualities, with good reason. As journalists Adam Harper and Clive Martin have pointed out, PC Music represents the polar opposite of the darkside tendencies that have characterized much of the underground electronic music of the past half-decade or more. In contrast to the attributes associated with dubstep, deep house, and techno-depth, seriousness, historicity-PC Music presents slick surfaces, a playful spirit, and a kaleidoscopic near-futurism. Along the way, PC Music proposes a set of critical questions about pop culture, accelerationism, hyperrealism, digital communities, gender, identity, and consumerism. The questions may not have definitive answers, but that's partly what's so fascinating about the collective. It's not didactic; to the contrary, it revels in ambiguities that even its artists may not fully understand.

That said, it's undeniable that PC Music is plenty divisive. Some critics, believing that there's a veneer of scorn glazing the label's appropriations, find its treatment of pop music dismissive or disingenuous. Plenty of others simply find the label's sped-up trance stabs saccharine, and its hiccup-ridden choruses annoying, artless, or worse. Clive Martin's excellent Vice article acknowledged the rancorous reaction elicited by the label with a hard-trolling headline, "PC Music: Are They Really the Worst Thing Ever to Happen to Dance Music?"(#Savedyouaclick: He doesn't think so. And neither do I, for that matter.)

In an interview from around the time he launched the label-one of very few he's given-Cook explained that the label's name was meant to allude "to how the computer is a really crucial tool, not just for making electronic music but for making amateur music that is also potentially very slick, where the difference between bedroom and professional studio production can be very ambiguous."

In that aspect, PC Music is a little like the latter-day equivalent of Trevor Horn's ZTT, in which new studio technologies were intended to democratize pop music. Only now, it's not video that killed the radio star and $20,000 Fairlight samplers that killed the songwriter and his backing band; it's P2P and YouTube and notebook computers running cracked copies of Ableton sweeping the old guard aside in one swift motion. In PC Music's version of the story, the world ends not with a bang, but with a "Bipp". Whatever happens next is steadily taking shape on PC Music's website, one exquisitely Photoshopped page at a time.

Read on for an introduction to PC Music's major players.

A. G. Cook

Beautiful by A.G. Cook
A. G. Cook is PC Music's founder and chief theorist. The 24-year-old has credits on a handful of the label's releases- Nu Jack Swung, "Keri Baby" [ft. Hannah Diamond], "Beautiful", Dux Content's "Like You" and Lifestyle-and he's contributed graphics to releases by easyFun and Maxo; it's a safe bet that he's also had a hand in other projects on the label, like easyFun and the Lipgloss Twins.

Before founding the label, he ran Gamsonite, a "pseudo-label" he's described as "a prototype for PC Music." But for the most part, it seems he arrived upon the scene with his vision fully formed.

For anyone who doubts Cook's genuine, non-ironic appreciation for pop music, that TANK Magazine interview is worth a read. He cites producers Max Martin and Jam & Lewis as inspirations and singles out Scritti Politti's Cupid and Psyche 85 as an example of "'extreme' pop music"-"a really beautiful balance of great hooks, rhythms and sounds." Praising Cassie, he says, "some of her tracks epitomize the minimal, synthetic, almost robotic potential of commercial music, something which can sound crap when it's done badly, but can also become a sort of perfect, untouchable product when done in the right way." To that end, I find it telling that he says he prefers to compose using "very plain sounds, basically the most boring string, flute and piano sounds my computer has": even at its most ecstatically garish, there's a deadpan quality to his sped-up trance anthems. (Perhaps for that reason he reserves special praise for Ukraine's Eurovision 2013 entry, Zlata Ognevich's "Gravity").

Special attention is due to A. G. Cook's DJ mixes, in which he stretches out and explores every possible angle of his aesthetic, from Carly Rae Jepsen homages to punchy preset disco to Teknian's "Sweded" version of Hudson Mohawke's "Cbat", sounding every bit as thin and weird as you might expect. (In fact, despite the wild swings in tempo and tone, PC Music generally works best mixed together. Granted, too much of the stuff can quickly become exhausting, but many of their mixes are unusually short: 31 minutes for Cook's "Personal Computer Music" mix, 14 minutes for his Creamcake mix, just nine minutes for GFOTY's "Secret Mix", and 10 minutes apiece for all the various players on the PC Music x DISown mix.)

SOPHIE

While PC Music constitutes a largely self-contained universe, SOPHIE has travelled a parallel path, appearing first on singles for Huntleys & Palmers and then Glasgow's Numbers label. Though not technically under the PC Music umbrella, her affiliation with the label recently solidified though a high-profile collaboration with A. G. Cook on a project called QT. It was briefly rumored that SOPHIE and Cook were, in fact, one and the same, but this photo of the pair on stage at SXSW suggested otherwise.

Listening to SOPHIE's music, you're tempted to wonder, how could anything so breezy be so dense? Every cubic centimeter of her constructions is packed with detail-helium-huffing voices, tea kettle squeals, Skittle-hued synth leads, plasticized foley effects, beats that careen like weaponized Slinkies-but it's also shot through with an aching sense of emptiness, as though every sound were cushioned in the dread that it might be the last sound you ever hear. Then, after each heart-in-mouth moment of silence, there's that reassuring cartoon zing! and we're zapped back to life, back to (hyper-)reality. I can't help but think of SOPHIE's chain-reaction beats in relation to the spectacular explosions of Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, and perhaps that's because collision plays such a key role in her music. The two opposed forces are, primarily, pop and anti-pop-the catchy and the cacophonous, the deft and the garish. Like the J-pop artist Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, whom SOPHIE interviewed for Dazed magazine, and with whom she's apparently collaborating, SOPHIE seems fascinated by the juxtaposition of the cute and the grotesque-or, more precisely, in the point where one becomes the other.

QT

If there's a complaint to be made about "Hey QT" it's that it's a bit too on-the-nose. QT, we're told, is "a sparkling future pop sensation"-not a person, but an energy drink, or an "Energy Elixir," to be precise, "where organic and synthetic meet to stimulate an uplifting club sensation." And yes, we get it-their music is fizzier than a bottle of Club Mate spiked with Pop Rocks. The dance music scene is already dominated by an actual energy-drink brand, so it's possible to read QT as a kind of subversive statement-cuteness as a form of critique. So far, though, that angle fails to deliver, and QT's deadpan Boiler Room performance didn't necessarily add to the concept. It began with QT's willowy singer/spokesmodel reclining on a chaise lounge, idly flipping through a fashion magazine while a piped-in voiceover attested to the virtues of the canned beverage, and it concluded with a deliberately unconvincing lip-sync of the studio track. Throughout both halves of the performance, at least on camera, the energy in the room looks as flat as a day-old soda.

The Boiler Room performance may be proof that translating PC Music's aesthetic from URL to IRL is harder than it seems, but the song itself is a masterful distillation of SOPHIE and Cook's pipsqueak aesthetic, with a call-and-response hook so simple ("Hey QT! Yeeeeeah?"), it's like the pop-music equivalent of one of Saul Bass' corporate logos. If they can just add a little more of their typical zaniness to the project, they may yet hit upon the secret formula for actual pop domination.

Danny L Harle

Broken Flowers by Danny L Harle
Danny L Harle's name doesn't figure prominently in PC Music's catalog; besides his work alongside Cook in Dux Content, he's recorded just one single for the label-the delightful, bittersweet "Broken Flowers", a limpid take on deep house that's not too far off from what Disclosure or Duke Dumont are doing, with the requisite nods to MK and Todd Edwards. It's one of the most outwardly sophisticated things to appear on the label, and not just because it sounds somehow more "grown-up," which it does; behind the lyrics' faux naiveté, there's a graceful little twist to the rhyme scheme that suggests some formidable pop craftsmanship at work.

Harle's influence on the label may be greater than his credits alone would suggest. Cook told TANK Magazine that the two musicians attended school together in their early teens and then reconnected when they discovered that they were working in parallel. "We shared so many ideas that I think we both felt more comfortable taking a slightly more conceptual approach," said Cook. "From then on music became much more of a craft-we weren't attached to any specific genre but we became very aware of music production as a potentially virtuosic activity. Tracks would often start as some kind of conversation or challenge and then we'd take turns programming everything, so making a super dense track with loads of layers became a slightly less exhausting exercise. Once I'd made a few tracks with Dan that I felt were satisfyingly high-level I had more energy to try that kind of stuff out on my own, or apply the same aesthetic to visual and web work."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Harle has a serious musical background: he studied composition at Goldsmiths, University of London, and in 2012, his chamber opera As Above, So Below was performed at the Wellcome Institute as part of the Pain Project, "a global research project into the cultural history of pain." In 2010, his song "Zombie Food" (tagged "#serious party") already showed an interest in camp and musical codes, with its jaunty shuffle, dissonant organ blasts, and generally madcap air; "Rare Birds," from the same year, was tagged "#Rn'Skweee," confirming the link between the Swedish and Finnish chiptune spinoff and whatever we're going to call PC Music's homegrown style. More recently, his "Sonatina" for two bass viols, posted early last month, suggests an affinity for Paul Hindemith's sonatas for cello. And from his Twitter account, we know that he is "not usually into microtones" and that one of his favorite songs is Guillaume de Machaut's 14th-century composition "Complainte: Tels rit au main qui au soir pleure (Le Remède de Fortune)". (Or, as he puts it, ONE OF MY FAVE TUNES EVER. NO CHORD CHANGES. 14th CENTURY. MACHAUT!)

All that, and he's a formidable DJ, too. His Rinse FM set with Sophie (begins at 1:03) is like an Ableton grid laid out over an expanse of quicksand: it's a virtual minefield of tempo changes, cooing babies, electro-acoustic drones, FM radio idents, white noise, and Eurotrance affect so fizzy it'll make your fillings hurt. A masterpiece, in other words.

Hannah Diamond

As a recording artist, Hannah Diamond is credited with two PC Music singles, "Pink and Blue" and "Attachment", as well as guest vocals on A. G. Cook's "Keri Baby". She's an odd character, clad in pink puffer jackets and styled a little like Sporty Spice circa "Wannabe", but with a voice that comes closer to that of an understudy in a production of Annie, maybe. Her infantilized qualities are reinforced by exaggeratedly naïve lyrics, like these from the sing-songy "Pink and Blue": "We look good in pink and blue/ You love me, maybe it's true/ You say baby how are you/ I'm OK, how about you." But she's no one-note character; the icy pathos of "Attachment" brings to mind Mike Oldfield's Kanye-sampled "In High Places" (again, as sung by that Little Orphan Annie understudy), resulting in an uncomfortable balancing act between blankness and earnestness.

In addition to her activities in PC Music, Diamond is co-editor and director of photography for LOGO Magazine, an online publication whose slick, slightly creepy editorials celebrate the merger of high tech and tongue-in-cheek. She's also part of the creative team Diamond/Wright, which was responsible for the art direction of QT's "Hey QT" cover; the lookbook for London latex-clothing brand (and logo obsessives) Meat; and fragrance campaigns for Princess Bambi-the singer (or avatar) responsible for the PC Music single "Less Love More Sex", who is typically styled like the girlfriend of a shady Russian oligarch.

GFOTY

GFOTY stands for "Girlfriend of the Year"; who knows whether her persona is meant to be some kind of critique of gender stereotypes, whether it falls back on gender stereotypes, or none of the above? There's the same sort of vocal processing happening here as in SOPHIE's "Bipp" and "Lemonade", and the same sort of brittle-yet-rubbery sonics predominate. Pitches shift promiscuously; drums splinter into fiber-optic shards; voices careen across the spectrum like helium balloons being unleashed, squealing, into the thick of a children's birthday party. I want to call this style pipsqueak, for the way it takes pop tropes and makes them blippy and small and, well, squeaky.

In any case, GFOTY is certainly responsible for some of the most maniacally catchy music in the PC Music catalog. Consider this chorus from the nine-minute "Secret Mix": "If your friend's your lover/ Let your friend be your lover/ 'Cause if your friend's your lover/ Then your looooove's/ Undercover". (Repeat ad nauseam, almost literally.)

Talk about high-low vertigo: how about that insistent, high-pitched chirping ("Wh-wh-what's your name? I l-l-l-like your smile") over a snatch of string quartet? And if you want punk, there's the relentless "Don't Wanna / Let's Do It", which is basically a sample of a single synth note and the phrase "I don't wanna do it" being marched up and down a sampling keyboard. It sounds like Eskibeat as performed by the world's most petulant teenager; it might be the most annoying thing you have heard all year, and, like a scab, it is almost impossible to stop returning to it.

Also worth a look: GFOTY's Instagram page, featuring inspirational quotes ("Behind every dolphin there's a girl with a shadow"; "FUCK WOT THEY FINK") and the most creative misuse of ellipses this side of TMZ ("Maybe you have to appreciate the darkness before you can appreciate the... light"; "Don't hate the girl, hate the girl behind... the girl").

Dux Content

Dux Content is the duo of PC Music head A.G. Cook and Danny L Harle, the artist credited with "Broken Flowers". It's difficult to glean too much more from the duo's Facebook page, given that all their press photos are digitally rendered, Sims-type images (and exceptionally creepy ones at that), and there's been no new activity on the page since November 2013, when PC Music re-released the duo's album Lifestyle with a new video by Daniel Swan. Lifestyle sounds like music for Second Life nightclubs: it opens with a plangent, pitch-bent synth lead that's straight out of ATB's trance chestnut "9PM (Till I Come)", and across its eight tracks it explores vaporized R&B, tracker-scene hardstyle, and a version of Steve Winwood's "Higher Love" that's like mainlining Stevia; "City Break", meanwhile, is a mindboggling fusion of Far Side Virtual-ism, "black MIDI"-inspired programming, and Jan Hammer gabber.

Dux Content's catalog also yields some intriguing clues to the pre-history of PC Music. Scroll back far enough, and you'll discover an album released under the alias Dux Consort called Disklavier Concert 1, featuring eight compositions for the Yamaha Disklavier-a kind of MIDI-programmable piano-by Spencer Noble, Daniel Harle, Alex (A.G.) Cook, and Tim Phillips. It's all gorgeous, forbidding stuff, pounding and dissonant, like Conlon Nancarrow tackling Alexander Scriabin with the occasional bit of Scott Joplin thrown in. The cover art is a beautiful approximation of the kind of sleeves that Factory and Les Disques du Crepuscule used to do. It suggests that despite PC Music's aggressively hyper-digital, post-virtualist aesthetics, Cook and Harle may harbor some latent High Modernist leanings as well.

Kane West

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"Authenticity" is probably the last word that's ever going to turn up in the context of PC Music, and that's probably a good thing, because duh: authenticity is boring. But! It's worth noting that the PC Music artist with the most archly tongue-in-cheek name also happened to succeed on his own merits outside the label's own DIY ecosystem. Several months before he put out anything on PC Music, Kane West turned up on Tiga's Turbo label remixing Tiga and Audion's "Let's Go Dancing". And he managed that the old-fashioned way: by winning a remix contest. I asked Tiga about it, just to make sure it wasn't some kind of publicity stunt. But nope: "Kane West was [the] honest winner," he wrote back. "His shit was too mental to ignore."

Sounds about right. Kane West's debut release for PC Music, the seven-song Western Beats mini-album, doesn't abide by many of the PC Music hallmarks; there's little that's self-consciously cute about it, and while the vocals are appropriately trippy-like the delirious, out-of-key loop of "Goin' crazy, goin' crazy, goin' crazy" from the song of the same name-they don't tend to be aggressively pitched up, the way so many PC Music vocals are. Given the record's arch, druggy, stripped-down house vibes, it would be reasonable to assume it was the work of an artist on a label like Cómeme or Body High.

Where West really gets weird, though, is in his contribution to the PC Music x DISown Radio free-for-all, in which A.G. Cook, GFOTY, Danny L Harle, Lil Data, Nu New Edition, and West all throw down for 10 minutes apiece. West's portion is overlaid with all manner of audio flotsam: rave whistles, exaggeratedly baritone ID tags ("K-k-k-kane West"), advertising language ("Best price in the world!"), phrases ripped from movie previews ("Don't miss The Magic of the Lost World"). "Hi, my name's Sarah, and I'm going to sing on the next one" chirps a woman, early in the segment, who may or may not be a computer program; there's something about her diction that belongs to the Uncanny Valley of vocaloid singers, although her British accent also sounds too idiosyncratic to be a machine. "I'd like to extend my warmest gratitude to Kane West for letting me appear on this song. Don't forget me when you're famous, Kane!" What follows isn't singing, though, but peppy statements like "Free shipping!" The overall effect is that of a replicant who's so cheerful, you don't have the heart to tell her she's just a skin job.

That kind of unexpected poignance runs through a lot of PC Music's work, so it's not all that surprising that Burial's "Archangel" turns up in the mix-except it's not Burial; it's West's own cover version, seemingly made on a Casiotone with a loose pitch-bend lever and a drum machine with a serious case of arrhythmia. (You can hear it at around 53:45.) It only gets more fucked-up sounding as it goes, and it almost falls to pieces at one point, only to be saved by a Kenny G-like sax melody that's hilarious and tearjerking all at once.

Life Sim

The only real information we have about Life Sim is a geotag: "NYC/LDN," per the artist's SoundCloud page. In some ways, Life Sim's productions to date feel ever so slightly less gonzo than the majority of PC Music's output, and more like "normal" dance music; the 20-minute "All Life" mixtape cruises along at a fairly conventional 140 BPM and toggles between whipcracking electro rhythms and lurching grooves that wouldn't sound entirely out of place on a label like Hessle or Hemlock. But the pasted-in strips of a cappella vocals are just a hair faster than in typical bass music-to say nothing of all those cheesed out trance stabs, or the fact that "Caladhort" foregrounds a looped line from Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe".

Life Sim's "This Life" mixtape, released back in June, just seven months after its predecessor, is even better. It touches upon plangent Detroit techno, Burial-esque prettiness, shuddering electro, and echoing string-pad melodies that recall classic Autechre or Aphex Twin-but all refracted through PC Music's uniquely twisted worldview. (See: the vocal sample that gets deployed halfway through, looping "Like, ever" in a West Coast drawl into a nonsense sing-along.)

Lipgloss Twins

Overload is in full effect on the first single from Lipgloss Twins, right down to a short video segment featuring the two "Twins" that plays simultaneously with the embedded SoundCloud audio and concludes just as the song is wrapping up its own introduction. Sonically, this is the Cook/SOPHIE aesthetic pushed to its limits: beats careen like a ping-pong tournament in a hurricane, melodies resemble a pachinko parlor with a faulty surge protector, and the sped-up vocals are little more than a deranged litany of brands and consumer jibberish ("Maybelline! Maybellicious / Topman, Topshop / Fake Prada, fake Louis, fake Zara"). Questions abound: where did they find these "Twins"? If they're speaking in American accents, why are they employing British grammatical quirks like "different to"? Why would a pig eat stationery? And what the hell does "My genes are ripped" mean?

Tielsie

__Palette by Tielse
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The SoundCloud tags employed by the Lyon-based producer Tielsie are a pretty good indicator of where his or her head is at: "#ADHD", "#Joy Juke", and "#160"-beats per minute, that is. Tielsie's first demos, which surfaced a year ago, suggested a staggering rhythmic imagination. There was "Hueboy", which sounded like footworking on top of a rainbow, and a remix of TWRK's "Living Room", which might have been a bit of Malian desert blues spun through some kind of particle accelerator. Most notable was a remix of Sophie's "Bipp" that injected a whole new degree of liquid urgency into the song without quite abandoning its cartoon kicks. After a proper release of "Hueboy" and the requisite DISmagazine mixtape featuring a brain-melting array of cute-ified club music (including the Japanese producer Pandaboy's reworking of the iPhone's "Marimba" melody), Tielsie joined PC Music two months ago with "Palette", a helium-voiced adrenaline rush that harnesses virtually every cliché in the book (hardstyle kicks, trap hi-hats, quarter-note claps, supersaw stabs) and plays it all back at 78 instead of 45.

easyFun

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__ easyFun EP by easyFun

Given that easyFun recorded PC Music's second release and hasn't been heard from since, it's reasonable to speculate that the project is an alias of one of the label insiders-possibly A. G. Cook and/or Daniel Harle. In any case, his/her/their sole release so far is brilliant-particularly in its online presentation, in which hyperkinetic slap-bass and DX-synth fugues combine with Easyjet-riffing graphics to turn into something like normcore on steroids: part Seinfeld, part Squarepusher, part Weather Channel b-roll music, and with Shutterstock watermarks amplified into aesthetic tropes in their own right. (The color scheme, meanwhile, is pure Air Huarache; make of that what you will.)

Felicita

There's no formal link between PC Music and Felicita, a new artist whose debut EP, Frenemies, will be released digitally on October 13 on the new Gum label. In fact, Frenemies will even get a 12-inch release, which at first seems completely antithetical to PC Music's digital-first approach-until you realize that it's being pressed on yellow vinyl. In press photos, it's styled with a yellow rubber ducky. (Cute!) But Felicita's Flubber-falling-down-the-stairs sound is very much in keeping with SOPHIE's hyperkinetic antics. The multi-tracked vocals sound like they might have been recorded by EVE, one of the robots in WALL-E, and it's not too hard to imagine the record's entire aesthetic being inspired by fast-forwarding through that film's trash-collecting scenes.

And that doesn't even begin to touch upon the fucked-up iconography of the artist's website: charm bracelets, pita bread, makeup brushes, a crimping iron, a tennis ball, a seapunk-blue wig, a freaking slug on a young woman's face. That website turns out to have been created in collaboration with Daniel Swan and Mari Santos, and Swan, at least, has also collaborated with PC Music's Dux Content and Thy Slaughter. Whatever's going on here, there's definitely a connection of some sort. For my money, Felicita is the most formally inventive of any of these artists, so I'm especially curious to see where Felicita goes next.

DJ Warlord

DJ Warlord, whoever he/she may be, pushes the PC Music aesthetic to a whole new level of ridiculousness. His "SS14 Embassy Mix" for London latex emporium Meat Clothing consists mainly of "Warmix" edits of pop, R&B, and trance songs-by Janet Jackson, Bell Biv DeVoe, ATB-sped up dizzingly fast and laced with airhorn blasts, vinyl spinbacks, and "Damn, son" audio tags. A song called "Russian Soldiers from Kasatka" that's credited to Burial turns out to be a sped-up snippet from the soundtrack to the Metal Gear Solid 2 video game. (He's got a point; it really does sound something like Burial.) And on his JPEOPLE Magazine mix, "the King of New-new" offers a similarly hyperspeed collection of rave stabs and jungle breaks, complete with a gunshot- and tea kettle-laced edit of Oneohtrix Point Never's "Zebra".

Whoever Warlord is, his Twitter account offers few clues. But perhaps that's the wrong question. As he tweeted last October, "People are always like 'who' is Warlord? Never 'why'..." Indeed.

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PC Music's Twisted Electronic Pop: A User's Manual

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What is PC Music? A label, a scene, a subgenre, a red herring? It may be all of these things at once. The shadowy operation and its bewildering brand of hyper-pop have been everywhere in the past few months, from UK broadcasters like Rinse FM to the XL Records roster to Boiler Room broadcasts, and its influence seems to be growing on a daily basis.

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Noisy, Ugly, and Addictive - Hyperpop could become the countercultural sound of the 2020s

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Noisy, Ugly, and Addictive - Hyperpop could become the countercultural sound of the 2020s

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In music and on roller coasters, speediness makes for the fun kind of scariness. When young punk rockers raised on the Ramones began to play their own music in the early 1980s, the rat-a-tat rumble of "Blitzkrieg Bop" accelerated into something called the blast beat: an all-out rhythmic carpet-bombing over which vocalists would groan about Satan, Ronald Reagan, and the resemblance between the two. This development pushed rock and roll's intrinsic logic-through dissonance, truth; in disaffection, pride-and invigorated new genres such as hardcore, grindcore, and death metal. In a 2016 book, the critic Ben Ratliff argued that blast beats also reflected a new technological landscape: "They were like the sound of a defective or damaged compact disc in one of the early players, a bodiless slice of digital information on jammed repeat."

Today, no drum kit is required for musicians to glitch and twitch with terrifying intensity. Open up any audio-editing software, pull a few sliders in one direction, put the resulting ugliness on loop, and there you have it: a headbangable hell-scream into eternity. Such sounds are everywhere online these days. On TikTok, I recently came across a series of videos in which teens compared how their parents wanted them to dress with how they actually wanted to dress. As preppy sweaters gave way to nose rings and black fishnets, the music flipped from a saccharine sing-along to a harsh digital pounding. The latter sound was like a car alarm outfitted with a subwoofer-but for some reason, it beckoned to be played louder, rather than to be shut off.
Read: What good is pop music during a pandemic?
These TikToks deployed a remix of music by Dylan Brady and Laura Les of the band 100 Gecs, which has helped pioneer this era's emerging misfit aesthetic. On the surface, the duo's 2019 debut album, 1000 Gecs, is a prankish, postmodern collage of Skrillex, Mariah Carey, Blink‑182, Nelly, Linkin Park, Kenny Loggins, eurodance, and ska. What glues together such clashing influences isn't just a sense of musicality-though Brady and Les are excellent songwriters-but a fascination with amusicality. The vocals are manipulated to achieve the whininess of SpongeBob SquarePants. The grooves fracture and reroute habitually. The harmonic textures evoke train cars on rusted tracks. Confrontational and bizarre, this sound brings in almost 2 million listeners a month on Spotify.
pop.
Though 100 Gecs' music rejects classification and formulas, a fungal burst of artists with like-minded approaches has erupted in the past few years, and Spotify has started using a new genre label: hyperpop. Signature songs include XIX's "Kismet," which places screams and rapping amid casino-floor bleeping, and Slayyyter's "BFF," which sounds like Kesha performing inside an air duct. As with any new taxonomy, the definition of hyperpop is blurry and contested; one meme cheekily suggests more precise terms such as glitchcore, ketapop (for the disorienting raver drug ketamine), and trans ragewave (because many of the creators are pissed and aren't cis). The word hyperpop does nail the way that the music 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 the term doesn't quite convey the genre's zest for punk's brattiness, hip-hop's boastfulness, and metal's noise.
Read: How pop music's teenage dream ended
As hyperpop has become a trending topic to argue over, people have at least agreed that the sound reflects its era. Here is music suited to TikTok's DIY hijinks, Twitch's video-game violence, and the all-you-can-listen-to, boundary-free possibilities of music streaming. You couldn't invent a more zeitgeist-baiting brew. But whenever a new chaotic youth aesthetic has arisen in musical history, it's been a reaction against, not just a reaction to, its times. Hardcore's blast beats, gangsta rap's provocations, and grunge's moans all used extremity to question mainstream values such as respectability, conformity, and consumerism. The irony is that the rebellion now marches under the seemingly tame mantle of pop.

Isn't pop hyper already? Trends come and go, but across the decades pop has remained broad and brash, prizing emotional exaggeration, relentless energy, and ridiculous, self-parodying personas. The rise of electronic production-which allows creators to bend the human voice and make utterly unnatural sounds-has only given pop a more deranged, artificial feel in the 21st century. Even as brooding hip-hop music began regularly outperforming peppy sing-alongs on the Billboard Hot 100 in the past decade, certain values have stuck around. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP," for example, ruled the charts last year precisely because of the hyperbolic scale of its boasts and bass.

But in the public consciousness, the term pop has long connoted market-driven insipidness, which has left space for styles such as rock and rap to sell themselves as inherently alternative. While pop is compromising, false, and cheerful, the theory goes, alternative artists are complex, authentic, and emotionally dynamic. Of course, anti-pop values have often had mass appeal-especially after the early '90s. That's when grunge went big and then fractured into a thousand Coachella acts, and when Nielsen SoundScan came along to reveal the popularity of hip-hop. The actual listening experience for many people, however, never fully lined up with insider-versus-outsider dichotomies marketed by the music industry. For a certain kind of person-say, a queer kid in the early 2000s who spent time on Britney Spears message boards while being bullied by guys who listened to Staind-enjoying pop could be a transgressive move.
The straight white normie is a hyperpop bogeyman as potent as the yuppie was for hardcore punk, or as the senator's son was for the Woodstock crowd.
The story of 2010s music is in part the story of such transgressions coming to light. When Spotify arrived in the U.S. in 2011, the buoyant sounds of Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, and Carly Rae Jepsen reigned. Soon, the new playlist culture-catering to café backgrounds and the intimacy of headphones-began rewarding the chill dance vibes of the Chainsmokers and the hypnotic raps of Drake. This led to two oddball online movements that fed into hyperpop. One was the "SoundCloud rap" scene of teens mixing hip-hop with nu metal and emo, those oft-mocked remnants of the alt-rock boom. The other movement saw Jepsen-style bubblegum become hipster fare. By the mid-2010s, Pitchfork had endorsed the satirical pseudo-superstars of the U.K. electronic label PC Music, which peddled deadpan hooks, frantic beats, and knowingly vapid lyrics. Addictive dance tracks by one critical darling, Sophie, used pneumatic whooshes and crinkling sounds to portray pop as a physical product: "Shake shake shake it up and make it fizz," went one robotically sung refrain.
Read: What pop music lost with the death of Sophie
That meta-pop wave almost seemed to mock human emotional expression altogether. But its main aim was to decouple pop's head-rush aesthetics from any commercial expectations, thereby opening space for wilder fun. Hyperpop often uses that space-and the fusions of SoundCloud rap-to supercharge alienation. As a teen, Laura Les aspired to write hits for the boy band One Direction, even as she burrowed into obscure punk, hip-hop, and dance scenes online. When she first encountered the work of PC Music, her "depression lapsed for a minute," and it felt like "rays of god beams [were] shining down from the clouds," she recently told Pitchfork. For 100 Gecs' breakout hit, " Money Machine," she recorded a hilarious burst of trash talk after a day of working at a dead-end service job and finding herself in fights with men. "I had been watching a lot of King of the Hill, and I constructed in my head a sort of Hank Hill asshole character to just absolutely break down," she told the podcast Song Exploder. "I was just kind of getting into that sort of mindset of these people that I'd grown up with, these people in St. Louis talking about their big trucks."

The straight white normie: That's a hyperpop bogeyman as potent as the yuppie was for hardcore punk, or as the senator's son was for the Woodstock crowd. A notable number of hyperpop artists, including Les, are transgender. Many others are gender-fluid or gay. Plenty embrace the notion that their music's mix of sparkle, aggression, and confoundingly distorted vocals reflects a queer sensibility. Last year, the gender-fluid Texas singer Dorian Electra put out a concept album in which they, taking inspiration from drag, campily inhabited the viewpoint of incels and alt-right trolls. Between patches of fratty-sounding rapping, "Mos Thoser," by the band Food House, salutes God as trans and calls upon the listener to "make some new behaviors that straight people will infringe on." That song's top YouTube comment as of this writing: "I swear this song literally just cured my gender dysphoria."

Of course, for the growing audience that this music attracts, the disaffection embedded within it can speak to all sorts of grievances. Hyperpop thrives on so-called alt TikTok, the social-media sphere fueled by goth types turned off by the coiffed choreography of straight TikTok; scrolling through alt TikTok is a lot like hanging out in the corners of a high-school cafeteria where the burners and art kids congregate. Many hyperpop songs come off like tech-addled teen comedies: "We broke up on PictoChat, crying on my DS," goes the chorus of Cmten and Glitch Gum's "Never Met!" (Yes, those terms sent me Googling.) Other tracks double down on the bristling introspection and score-settling of emo rap. The buzzy 15-year-old Osquinn makes highly melodic diary entries asking questions like "Why am I so ignorant? Why am I so toxic?" Rico Nasty, a rapper who often works with 100 Gecs, specializes in motivational rudeness: "If you wanna rage / Let it out / Bitches throwin' shade / Punch 'em in they mouth!"

Hyperpop is young and flickering; any day now, it might morph, die out, or go supernova. If it has a celebrity figurehead, she is the U.K. singer Charli XCX, who sang on or co-wrote a number of Hot 100 smashes in the mid-2010s. Her own solo work-some of which was made in collaboration with the PC Music crowd and 100 Gecs' Dylan Brady-has gotten gnarlier and more cybernetic over the past few years as she has preached about ignoring genre categories altogether. While mass audiences haven't been thrilled by such explorations, her obsessive fan base has been. Early in last year's coronavirus lockdown, she wrote parts of her thrashing but vulnerable new album, How I'm Feeling Now, while letting her followers watch-and give input-via Zoom and Instagram Live. It was a fitting stunt for a sound born of the internet's ability to connect socially stranded people. "I'm online and I'm feeling so glamorous," Charli sings on one song. "In real life, could the club even handle us?" The shock-wave noises engulfing her mechanized voice imply an answer: At most clubs, this music wouldn't belong. That's the point.

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woodstock crowd.the story of 2010s music

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In music and on roller coasters, speediness makes for the fun kind of scariness. When young punk rockers raised on the Ramones began to play their own music in the early 1980s, the rat-a-tat rumble of "Blitzkrieg Bop" accelerated into something called the blast beat: an all-out rhythmic carpet-bombing over which vocalists would groan about Satan, Ronald Reagan, and the resemblance between the two.

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Subcultures: The Basics by Ross Haenfler

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Subcultures: The Basics by Ross Haenfler

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How Hyperpop Became a Force Capable of Reaching and Rearranging the Mainstream

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How Hyperpop Became a Force Capable of Reaching and Rearranging the Mainstream

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Musical niches and subcultures, it's been argued, operate outside of dominant culture while remaining engaged in a continual act of negotiation and renegotiation with the mainstream. No matter how anti-establishment their intentions are, subcultures always seem to arrive at the same fate: The commodification and aestheticization of their resistance by the very central structures they seek to resist. What is there left to do, then, other than to embrace that fate?

Canonized by a team of Spotify editors, including Lizzy Szabo in the summer of 2019, 'Hyperpop' was a term taken from Szabo's data science colleague Glenn McDonald, in an attempt to contextualize the growing traction surrounding an internet infected duo named 100 gecs, and the scene of like minded musicians who seemed to be forming around them. Artists operating under the Hyperpop rubric - from established stars like Charli XCX to Gen Z newcomers like osquinn and ericdoa - have concurrently played a hand in boosting it from a niche internet scene to a viral talking point, having received unexpected cosigns from the likes of YouTuber pewpiedie and and EDM superproducer Skrillex. Practitioners seek to accelerate and exaggerate pop music to the point of abrasion and absurdity. And while no formal genre conventions truly exist across its spectrum - much like Spotify's playlist, Hyperpop is scene-led rather than genre-led - a prototypical song will usually sound like the meeting point between experimental sound design and EDM influenced pop from the 2010s.

Unlike punk, emo, grunge, psychobilly, this niche that's been called "Hyperpop" for at least the past year and a half is keen to reach the mainstream, albeit through experimental means. "It's always been our ambition to take Hyperpop to the mainstream," says umru, one of Hyperpop's du jour producers, who's worked with Charli XCX, Dorian Electra, Slayyyter, among many others in the scene. As an underlying rule, the genre's practitioners "take the more traditional ideas of mainstream pop music, then deconstruct or intensify its more identifiable elements," Rebecca Black, a recent Hyperpop convert, tells .

Hyperpop is a structurally reactive phenomenon. It seeks to find new entry points into the mainstream, with the ambition to simultaneously drain experimental music of its elitism and exclusivism, while making mainstream music more challenging and boundary-pushing. The sheer clamor and conjecture that's followed Hyperpop - all the YouTube explainer videos , thinkpieces , and Reddit music nerds that have made ruckus over a new sound they've yet to find the words for - may have proven that there's a market for this new strain of extreme pop music.

Indeed, The Atlantic projected that "Hyperpop could become the countercultural sound of the 2020s"; Dazed called it "the sound for a post-pandemic world"; Dummy named it "the future of music." And while these predictions might sound overblown, with the eponymous playlist achieving some of Spotify's most consistent save rates - and tracks within the genre reaching upwards of 100 million streams - Hyperpop's statistical success is beginning to match the enormity of those claims, as the scene is bridging the gap between the popular and the experimental.

Still, the question remains: what exactly Hyperpop? A cursory Google search reveals the earliest entry for 'Hyperpop' to be from 1988, in an on the Scottish dream pop band Cocteau Twins. While most historians situate its origin within the 2010s SoundCloud beat scene , the real fun of Hyperpop, at least for now, lies in the fact that it provides a reflexive and interpretive exercise in aesthetic categorization. In other words, most individuals who come into contact with the quasi-genre will have their own ideas of where its origin lies, what its inspirations are, and what songs of yore - anything from The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" to The Fast Food Rockers' 2003 smash "Fast Food Song" - we may be able to classify as "Hyperpop."

Ultimately that dynamic benefits the platforms that are dependent and benefitted by user-generated content (UGC) - a rising phenomenon which blurs the lines between production and consumption, artist and fan. "People want to share their taste - they want to say, this is what I think, these are the tracks that I cosign, these are the ones I've found," says Szabo. User-generated content (anything created by fans and users online, including everything from the 'Blinding Lights' TikTok dance to user reviews on Metacritic) has been forecast to rake in around $6 billion for the music industry over the next three years, according to a report published by last October, and Hyperpop happens to be one of its most agile facilitators.

RCA Records' Vice President Dan Chertoff credits the lockdown for the rise of user-generated content and Hyperpop, both of which have been bolstered exponentially by TikTok. "User-generated content has become very important," says Chertoff. "Over the pandemic, TikTok in particular has become such a huge marketing force for new music - and I think specifically because of that, Hyperpop has grown tremendously."

The reason why Hyperpop inspires so much user-generated content, Chertoff believes, is down to its polarizing nature. "That's a good thing for people wanting to make UGC that sticks out. Hyperpop is exaggerated pop music, it's experimental, it's very distinct and I think that fits nicely into people wanting to make unique videos." If artists are looking to break into the mainstream today, user-generated content is providing an increasingly reliable model for making it. "More and more, we are seeing a conversion from user-generated content to audio streaming," says Chertoff.

Earlier this year, Chertoff signed his first Hyperpop artist, the 17 year-old Canadian artist and producer ElyOtto, whose song 'SugarCrash' has soundtracked well over five million TikTok clips, becoming one of the most popular tracks in the app's history. The track has also scored almost 140,000,000 Spotify streams, giving Chertoff all the data he needed to back his belief in ElyOtto's songwriting savvy and ability to write a hit.

Hyperpop's appeal to the mainstream also lies in its flexibility. Following its arrival via the Spotify playlist, and its ascendance to cultural flashpoint status, the term has functioned as a "centralizing idea around which an entire movement built momentum," product designer John Palmer wrote in his on Hyperpop and scissor labels last year. A cannabalizer of online music scenes, Hyperpop grows and its boundaries dissolve the more musicians are brought into its fold, in turn expanding its audience and pushing it towards the center.

The boundarylessness of Hyperpop is a stance that tends to be shared by many of its practitioners, who are generally anti-rhetorical and anti-territorial. With good-natured irony, they'll often laugh off any attempts made to theorize it or to define it ("it's just not something we think about," says umru.) Perhaps more so than any musical genre or scene in operation today, Hyperpop's necessary dependence and relationship with surveillist, data-capturing platforms like Spotify is a playful one. "I don't know if I wanna die/ Hyperpop playlist Spotify," fraxiom, one of the scene's key players sings on "fly with ü".

The irony here is that Hyperpop has been codified by the very structures it mocks, and its playful embrace of these structures has, so far, only emboldened them. "I think becoming a meme in some ways has been a success for us because it makes it fun - it makes it engaged beyond a list of songs," says Szabo.

Still, many Hyperpop artists and practitioners remain anonymous, often choosing to derail surveillance efforts by setting up multiple online accounts. But Szabo and the Spotify team are usually able to find them and promote them on their playlist, a testament to the power and impact of Spotify's data extraction and surveillance. "It's been interesting to see something that still feels so niche breaking out," says Szabo. "And I think because we put a label on it, it's allowed people to discover it on Spotify."

Indeed, those who wish to be rediscovered would be wise to align themselves with the Hyperpop label, since those within the scene appear content to recontextualize songs of yore within this new framework. fraxiom's "fly with ü", after all, is essentially a revisitation of a bygone hit from the '00s by the Italo dance artist Gigi D'Agostino. It can also be read as a sonic archive and appreciation of internet kitsch and detritus, the hilariously ephemeral; obsolete memes are repurposed into Hyperpop lyrics and iconography - making it an ideal entry point for someone like Rebecca Black, who, in 2011, was unfairly maligned for making "the worst song of all time" . "Friday," a song about a schoolgirl who just couldn't wait for the weekend, inspired one of the greatest onslaughts of memes the internet's ever seen. With its tinny, over-tuned vocals and baseless and berserk jouissance, all courtesy of pop saboteurs Ark Music Factory, 'Friday' could be considered the ultimate proto-Hyperpop anthem. "Everyone in the scene loves Rebecca Black," says umru.

Just as well, Hyperpop provided a supportive and encouraging community for Black, who had felt isolated from the industry for much of her career post-Friday. With the scene's association with queerness (many of its artists identify as such), Black, who was freshly "out," felt emboldened to find "freedom on her own terms," she tells , which directly translated into the music she was making. The result of which can be heard most crudely on the Hyperpop remix of "Friday", which was released this year to commemorate the song's ten-year anniversary, and features production by Brady, as well as appearances by Dorian Electra and Big Freedia.

Hyperpop could well be providing a pathway back into the mainstream for other effervescent acts of the early 2010s, much like the crunkcore duo 3OH!3, who also appeared on the "Friday" remix. Nathaniel Motte (one half of the 'Don't Trust Me' duo, which also includes Sean Foreman) had worked with Black on her turning-point track "Saboteur," before the duo began work on their own comeback in late 2020. For this, they too enlisted 100 Gecs on last November's track "Lonely Machine." The groups shared a mutual friend and collaborator in the eccentric songwriter Benny Blanco, who relayed to Motte and Foreman that 100 Gecs had considered them a huge influence. "We tend to keep our heads down and work on the next thing," says Motte. "But occasionally we can see that we've influenced music in some small way, and the general zeitgeist 0f the people we've reached over the years."

Generally, A&Rs and industry insiders have been keeping their paws on the Hyperpop trend, keen to align their artists with a sound and scene that's gaining immense traction. Rico Nasty, one of today's finest up-and-coming rappers, teamed up with 100 Gecs last year for "Ringtone," the highlight on their remix album. "We literally met through my A&R," Nasty tells . "It made sense to me because it was the first time I heard someone's music that made me feel the way my music did. There's something about their stuff that just has no rules."

If there's an artist who's primed above any other to convert Hyperpop's subcultural capital into mainstream visibility and success it's the 15 year-old, North Carolina based Ash Gutierrez AKA glaive. After immersing himself in the Soundcloud community, glaive uploaded his first song onto the platform in April, 2020. Upon discovering it in June, Awad took glaive under his wing-telling the New York Times that fall that "This kid is the best songwriter I've ever heard in my life." Shortly after, glaive signed to Interscope, who have since billed him the bedroom-dweller who's " writing pop's future ."

While yet to reach the charts, glaive has amassed almost nine million Spotify streams on his 2020 single 'astrid', as well as cosign from fellow Interscope signee . Having also worked alongside Travis Barker, glaive has also become one of an emerging number of Hyperpop artists who are aligning themselves with mainstream acts, including 100 Gecs- who Lana Del Rey released a remix of Linkin Park classic "One Step Closer," and had their first entry on Billboard's Alternative Songs chart last year when Fall Out Boy hopped on the remix for their track "Hand Crushed By a Mallet."

Nevertheless, Gutierrez is insistent that he is representing himself rather than a whole genre or movement. "I think there is too much variety to say that Hyperpop as a genre could go mainstream," he says. Even umru, who has greater hopes for the genre's crossover potential, is a little skeptical that big business' recent interest will amount to much. "People in the industry are always looking for anything that gains quick traction," says umru, with a slight hint of boredom. "Hyperpop isn't unique in that way."

But regardless of the potential commercial impact, as a once-niche online scene and the mainstream are beginning to intermingle - the center and the periphery influencing one another - Hyperpop is opening artists on both sides up to experimentation and convivial lawlessness. "I think that's the best part about everything that's going on," says Awad. "It's just making it fun to be creative again."

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How Hyperpop Became a Force Capable of Reaching and Rearranging the Mainstream

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Unlike punk, emo, grunge, psychobilly, this niche that's been called "Hyperpop" for at least the past year and a half is keen to reach the mainstream, albeit through experimental ...

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Queer London: how the city’s LGBTQ+ scene survived

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Queer London: how the city’s LGBTQ+ scene survived

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Queer London: how the city’s LGBTQ scene survived

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Since 2006, nearly 60 per cent of London’s LGBTQ venues have closed down. As Alim Kheraj writes, it’s a situation London’s queer community has faced – and overcome – before.

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SOPHIE: behind the mixing board and under pop’s bonnet

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SOPHIE: behind the mixing board and under pop’s bonnet

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When SOPHIE flashes up on my computer screen, for a second it's hard to tell what's real.

She's wearing a boxy black T‑shirt and a thin gold chain, sitting up straight and letting her auburn curls fall to her shoulders. But behind the Scottish artist/​producer is an explosion of light and colour, a sunbathed wall of pink and crimson roses worthy of a Matisse painting.

First thought? Oh, she's using one of those fake backgrounds on Zoom, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the deep space vista. No, she smiles, she's at her mum's house in Northampton, out in the garden. Lockdown really has rotted my brain. Either way, the mise en scène is faultless: you can rely on SOPHIE to go the extra aesthetic mile.

A word that often pops up when people talk about SOPHIE is ​"carbonated". Her songs are fizzy and sweet and bright and elastic, like lemonade or bubblegum. They blow up in your face and go: POP. A string of early singles - , and - marked her out as one of the most avant-garde dance producers of the ​'10s, aligned with the art school chic of London's PC Music collective.

But her high-wattage sound was always destined for the main stage, and soon she was collaborating with forward-thinking artists like Charli XCX, MØ and Vince Staples, and getting in the studio with Diplo and Madonna. Her debut album was another revelation. Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, released in 2018, heralded a soft-spoken producer coming out of the shadows, combining Autechre-weird electronics with dreamy pop ballads and presenting her, for the first time, as an artist, a performer and a visible, tangible woman. It was, as they say, a look.

SOPHIE was deep into the making of her second album when lockdown began, and the whole experience has made her ​"think twice" about the direction of the project.

"Whatever is put out into the world now needs to somehow be reactive to [the pandemic] and learn from this situation," she says, birds chirping in the background. ​"I feel some kind of shift of consciousness is occurring, whether that's me coming into this more reflective place or whatever else it is, and I'm curious to know how that might manifest itself musically."

In the meantime, she's seeking out stimulation by listening to some of her all-time favourite pop productions - songs that capture a perfect mood and songs that changed the course of music history.

Twenty of those productions from her own back catalogue are collected in a playlist she's compiled for a new feature on Apple Music. Behind the Boards gathers tracks made by key producers with various artists, with the first tranche of playlists also including selections from Stormzy/​Adele wingman Fraser. T Smith, Jae5 (J Hus, Dave), Catherine Marks (Foals, PJ Harvey), Dan Carey (Kate Tempest, Fontaines D.C.) and Nile Rodgers ( you know).

From her idyllic English rose garden, then, SOPHIE tells the stories of five of her pop creations - and highlights five more classic singles from some of her favourite producers.

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SOPHIE: behind the mixing board and under pop's bonnet

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When SOPHIE flashes up on my computer screen, for a second it's hard to tell what's real. She's wearing a boxy black T‑shirt and a thin gold chain, sitting up straight and letting her auburn curls fall to her shoulders.

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Step aside, Top 40. There's a new genre of pop in town, and it's run by queers. The genre, late-2010's in origin and appropriately titled "hyperpop" - unofficially coined beep-boop music - has risen in popularity recently as the music industry leans into digital consumption and production accessibility. Transgender artists, despite the music industry's historical rejection of them, have found home, and even success within the hyperpop niche. Artists like Arca, Dorian Electra, Kim Petras, SOPHIE and Laura Les, each trans or nonbinary themselves, currently lead the loosely-defined genre . Countless other smaller trans and artists push it forward, diversifying hyperpop's sound and expanding its influence throughout the internet.

Trans-inclusivity is hyperpop's framework. SOPHIE, a genre pioneer, maintains her influence on the genre since its creation. After the release of her first project, "Product" in 2015, fans referred to SOPHIE's sound as "PC Music," meaning 'personal computer' music, due to the techo-pitched, futuristic sound. PC Music is also a London-based record label created by the equally-influential A.G. Cook, which has served as a home to many early artists of the hyperpop genre today. Though not signed to PC Music, SOPHIE's unmatched sound, consisting of pitched-vocals and heavily experimental instrumentals, as well as her friendship and collaboration with many artists under the label, solidified her status within the cult genre.

Upon her debut, the artist rarely allowed for photos with fans, and refused to show her face in any visuals or art related to her music. That changed in 2017 when SOPHIE released her debut album "Oil of Every Pearls Un-Insides," and publicly came out as a transgender woman. She used the music video for her lead single "It's Okay to Cry " to intentionally show her face to her audience for the first time.

It's not hard to see the trans influence on the artist's sound before her face reveal with the Grammy-nominated album. You just need to know how to look for these influences. Within "Product," each song consists of hyperpop-signature pitched vocals and maximalist, exaggerated lyrics regarding hyperfeminine caricatures such as latex, silicone and ponytails (listen to the song "Hard").

However, in her 2017 album, SOPHIE leans into her transgender experience. She unapologetically admits, "I'm real when I [photo]shop my face" in the song, "Faceshopping," and questions the reality of gendered consciousness. In "Immaterial," she asks, "Without my legs or my hair, without my genes or my blood, with no name and with no type of story, where do I live? Tell me, where do I exist?" The album doesn't stray from the original extremist pitched sounds from her previous work - it simply exists as a further contextualization of her now fully-realized identity.

Pitched vocal tracks are more mainstream due to the recent breakout artists "100 gecs," a St. Louis duo consisting of Dylan Brady and the absolute trans icon Laura Les. The two have unreleased work on Soundcloud dating back years, but reached the hyperpop mainstream in 2019 with their debut studio album, "1000 gecs." Les, credited with naming the duo after accidentally ordering 100 geckos online, has been open about the reasoning behind pitching her vocals up, stating that it not only sounds 'cooler' to her - it helps in calming her gender dysphoria when listening back to herself.

Pitched vocal effects are a reason why many trans artists are drawn to the hyperpop sound. Mainstream artists influenced by hyperpop, such as genre-benders Charli XCX and Rico Nasty, use pitched vocals liberally. In fact, both artists released singles this year produced by Brady using this technique, and were featured in the duo's remix project of their debut, 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues.

Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of 100 gecs is it's absurdity in both lyrics and sound. The intro to the duo's most popular song, "Money Machine," begins with a jarring callout by Les - "Hey you lil piss baby, you think you're so f*cking cool? Huh? You think you're so f*cking tough? You talk a lot of big game for someone with such a small truck." The emasculation does not stop there, though. Les also compares her rival's arms to little cigarettes, threatening to "smoke" them, and then promising to ghost her opponent once they admit they've fallen in love with her.

With an accompanying chorus that speaks of big boys coming in with big trucks, assumingly much larger than Les's antagonist's, and a chaotic 18-second sound breakdown to close, the track reads more like an extreme musical parody than a signature song from a debut album.

But that's the beauty of hyperpop. It is defined by pushing pop music to its limits and satirizing the gendered music industry. There's an enjoyable sense of irony and juxtaposition.

There's just something so entertaining about being called a "little piss baby" by someone who sounds like a chipmunk. The hypermasculinity of the song, accompanied by Les' vocals read as caricature because that's the entire point. The song pokes fun at the "manly" sounds of pop punk with open threats and corny one-liners. We all loved 3OH!3's beef with some girl's boyfriend (despite being vegetarian), but the annoying thing about "Don't Trust Me" is that people actually read it as a legitimate "for the boys" grudge anthem. The musical tropes of both angry hypermasculinity and hypersexualized femininity underlie the gender binary's utter absurdity and make listeners aware of the root folly of the gender binary.

Trans people, especially trans women, notice these standards more quickly than cis-gendered people because of how unachievable and toxic the expectations of gendered idealism truly are.

Growing up, girls are expected to listen and look up to the female artists of their time, historically thin, white, and feminine, while boys are pushed to explore the angry and often misogynistic sounds of rock & roll, rap, and punk. Trans people who transition within the binary have the distinct experience of aiming to fulfill these ideals from both sides within their lifetimes, resulting in that jarring awareness of absurdity along the way.

So, reader, understand that hyperpop matters as a safe space for trans artists to explore musicality. It is a genre built on laughing in the face of what is normal and creating something so extreme within its boundaries that the obvious gendered tropes become bizarre.

As hyperpop inches closer to the horizons of the mainstream, musicians outside of the transgender experience have added to the genre, notably Shygirl, Alice Longyu Gao, and That Kid bring new interpretations of the sound for listeners - this development isn't bad, though.

Hyperpop isn't exclusively trans - it never has been. As public consciousness of gender and sexuality grows, musicians and listeners will inevitably grow tired of the gendered traditionalism in music and will look for new sounds to replace it. Maybe hyperpop isn't a genre after all - maybe it's simply a movement for artists to reject current standards in the hopes of a better future. Or maybe it's just a fad that artists are jumping on now. One thing is for sure, though: trans artists have inherently been a part of the hyperpop conversation from the beginning, and they're here to stay.

For more insight on this topic, check out Ringtone Magazine's story on trans artists in the genre: https://www.ringtonemag.com/2020/08/how-hyperpop-gives-trans-artists-voice_13.html

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Trans Roots in the Hyperpop Music Genre - ORANGE Magazine

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Step aside, Top 40. There's a new genre of pop in town, and it's run by queers. The genre, late-2010's in origin and appropriately titled "hyperpop" - unofficially coined beep-boop music - has risen in popularity recently as the music industry leans into digital consumption and production accessibility.

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How the art of PC Music revolutionised a visual world for pop music and beyond

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How the art of PC Music revolutionised a visual world for pop music and beyond

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How the art of PC Music revolutionised a visual world for pop music and beyond

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Speaking to A. G. Cook, Hannah Diamond, Timothy Luke and more, we unearth the long history of PC Music's internet-orientated aesthetic.

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We unearth the long history of PC Music's internet-orientated aesthetic.

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We unearth the long history of PC Music's internet-orientated aesthetic.

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How the art of PC Music revolutionised a visual world for pop music and beyond

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Speaking to A. G. Cook, Hannah Diamond, Timothy Luke and more, we unearth the long history of PC Music's internet-orientated aesthetic.

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"...you don’t have to be queer to enjoy the music."

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"...you don’t have to be queer to enjoy the music."

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That Kid Exemplifies the Queer Aesthetics of Hyperpop

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While the lyrics and sonic presence of his latest remix album, ‘Crush: The Remixes,’ speak to the LGBT+ experience, you don’t have to be queer to enjoy the music.

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Lady Gaga’s “Dawn of Chromatica” Smashes Spotify Record

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Lady Gaga’s “Dawn of Chromatica” Smashes Spotify Record

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Lady Gaga released her new "Dawn of Chromatica" album on Friday last week.

It's basically a remix album of her album "Chromatica"... and it's already breaking records!

It had the BIGGEST debut of all time on Spotify for a remix album with over 7.6 million streams.

#LadyGaga's #DawnOfChromatica makes History, scoring the BIGGEST Debut of All Time on Spotify for a Remix Album, with over 7.6 MILLION Streams!💪💿🥇💥🌎🎧🔥👑💗💚 https://t.co/hK48MrPP2E pic.twitter.com/JHkXrgON6t

- World Music Awards (@WORLDMUSICAWARD) September 5, 2021

Twitter Source: @WORLDMUSICAWARD Feature Picture Source: Lady Gaga Facebook Page

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Lady Gaga's "Dawn of Chromatica" Smashes Spotify Record

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Lady Gaga released her new "Dawn of Chromatica" album on Friday last week. It's basically a remix album of her album "Chromatica"... and it's already breaking records!

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“It’s the future of music”: hyperpop is taking root in the UK

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“It’s the future of music”: hyperpop is taking root in the UK

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From a quick glance at Spotify's tastemaking 'hyperpop' playlist, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the futuristic, glitchy sounds that bridge the gap between pop, rap, nightcore, trance, emo, metal and rave are almost exclusively being made by US-born-or-based artists. While the likes of PC Music, SOPHIE and Charli XCX were undoubtedly architects of the hard-to-define micro-genre, a close contingent of acts including umru, glaive, ericdoa, d0llywood1, SEBii, Petal Supply, osquinn, midwxst, blackwinterwells, RYL0, aldn, That Kid, Glitch Gum and CMTEN have been running things in North America, landing major label deals, media attention and SoundCloud documentaries in the process. But that's only half the picture. There's a lesser-known yet equally-exciting scene spread across the UK underground, with aspiring producers, singers and rappers in their late-teens and early 20s becoming friends and making music together online.

Whether it's Worldwide Princess' pitch-shifted starry-eyed experimentalism, phonewifey's uncategorisable barrages, the PC Music-influenced worlds of popstar-in-waiting Roma Radz and nu-metal rave girl AVA AKIRA (you won't be able to get ' Incomplete ' out of your head), the Bladee-inspired glitchy emo-rap of Glasgow's pposture and FALINEE, Wales' kurtains, Manchester's Sleepa, Sickface and ezekiel, Kent's Voidie or Kid Trash, this unofficial collective represents a new generation of bedroom artist.

Other notable names with discographies worth digging into are Paco Cuf, Cloud125, Gross Boy and Arthur Prada. They're each taking hyperpop in wildly exciting - yet often contrasting - directions. But many of them feel as though the UK scene is being unfairly overlooked; it's a fair analysis considering that fewer than 10 out of 160 tracks on the coveted Spotify playlist are currently by, or feature, a UK artist.

"It's a growing scene in the UK and I believe a lot of editors shy away from it," says 19-year-old Voidie, whose Facebook-born collaboration with Sleepa, ' Impressed ', is sitting at 65,000 streams thanks to placement on the sought-after playlist. Having been bedroom producing various genres of music for eight years, Sleepa feels that hyperpop "allows for endless creative freedom and expression; it's the future of music and I think it's about to blow up in the UK". Looking at his streaming stats, he says "when I'm on my computer making this music which reaches people all over the world, I sometimes forget how under-appreciated it is in my own city".

Voidie argues that it might be because "it's a new sound that people have got to adjust their ears to". He's confident, however, that it's "going to be huge soon; it's definitely on its way up." But why does he think artists from the UK scene aren't getting as much notoriety as their US counterparts? "Honestly, I don't know. It's taking a moment for people to get used to it because, before 2020, glitchcore/hyperpop didn't really exist - apart from a few pioneers."

Eighteen-year-old Glasgow-born pposture, who only started producing in late 2018 and began doing vocals in summer 2019, agrees. "Personally, especially while starting out, I felt like there was very limited UK representation within the hyperpop subgenre, as it was dominated by US artists and the UK artists who had already built themselves a following didn't really show that they were from the UK. I think this has become less of a problem as the genre has grown with the likes of rosesleeves, Wido and ezekiel collaborating with American artists via the internet." What's great about the catch-all phrase 'hyperpop', he says, is that "it's such a big umbrella term that it's likely to continue to get bigger because there is so much variety within the scene. It's not just got one distinct sound - it's constantly evolving".

"Russia and other parts of Europe like Poland and Germany are really on the ball with niche music already" - AVA AKIRA

For London-based AVA AKIRA, who started uploading tracks to SoundCloud in 2018 "with no real genre in mind," veering towards hyperpop has allowed her to create without any restrictions or barriers. Having had her flute-dream hit 'Locket' added to the coveted playlist ("seeing my track in there blew my mind!"), she suggests that "it seems anything goes as long as it's experimental, melodic, and catchy. Although it is such a loosely used term, it does leave you wondering when will a line be drawn? Or maybe not and it can become a huge movement rather than just a genre and create a whole new wave of experimental artists?" With more people being online and on TikTok because of never-ending lockdowns, she hopes the UK will "catch up with hyperpop soon; Russia and other parts of Europe like Poland and Germany are really on the ball with niche music already!"

phonewifey, who recently dropped their mind-boggling ' HARD YEAR' EP via Dummy's DMY Artists, never really understood exactly what hyperpop was or is. "It's a lot of intensely creative people who are all eager to work together and have a lot of shared references and ideas," they say. "In that respect, it's a really thriving and creative scene," they continue, saying that while alt-rap autotune-heavy 808-music was at the heart of their early sound, club culture and rave music has become more of a central influence. "But I'm not clear with whom hyperpop really begins and ends. I have no idea if I really fit the label (and it's not really for me to say either, I suppose!)" If it is a scene, though, they feel that hyperpop's home is on the internet. "Yes, I work a lot with people close by in London (and when we can put on live shows again that will be even more important in creating strong local scenes), but a big part of this whole thing seems to be the ability to connect with people around the world online and organise collabs, feats and online shows together."

With artists in the UK scene increasingly joining forces (there are plans for a cypher track to rival umru's mega 'movinglikeazombie' remix, which featured nine US fan favourites), they could be on the cusp of global cult fame. Voidie is right to be confident about its future, then. "The goal is to make the scene as big as it is in the US - because why not? It should be. I think it will be difficult, but 100 per cent possible - we've just got to get the right attention. It's coming but it's all about when; it's the future of music and to be there at the beginning is really quite something."
Listen to our 'UK hyperpop' playlist:

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"It's the future of music": hyperpop is taking root in the UK

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From a quick glance at Spotify's tastemaking 'hyperpop' playlist, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the futuristic, glitchy sounds that bridge the gap between pop, rap, nightcore, trance, emo, metal and rave are almost exclusively being made by US-born-or-based artists.

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What Does “Success” in Music Mean Right Now?

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What Does “Success” in Music Mean Right Now?

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The proportion of the UK population aged 16 years and over identifying as heterosexual or straight decreased from 94.6% in 2018 to 93.7% in 2019.

An estimated 2.7% of the UK population aged 16 years and over identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) in 2019, an increase from 2.2% in 2018.

Between 2018 and 2019, the number of men identifying as LGB increased from 2.5% to 2.9% and women identifying as LGB increased from 2.0% to 2.5%.

Younger people (aged 16 to 24 years) were most likely to identify as LGB in 2019 (6.6% of all 16 to 24 year olds, an increase from 4.4% in 2018); older people (aged 65 years and over) also showed an increase in those identifying as LGB, from 0.7% to 1.0% of this age category.

Between 2018 and 2019, the proportion of people who identified as LGB increased for England (2.7%, up from 2.3%) and Scotland (2.7%, up from 2.0%), however Wales (2.9%) and Northern Ireland (1.3%) remained stable; among English regions, people in London were most likely to identify as LGB (3.8%, an increase from 2.8%).

Statistician's comment

"An estimated 1.4 million people aged 16 and over in the UK identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) in 2019 - a statistically significant increase from 1.2 million in 2018 - continuing the trend we have seen over recent years.

"People aged 16 to 24 continue to be the most likely to identify as LGB, however the proportion of older adults identifying as LGB, while much smaller, is also increasing."

Penelope McClure, Population Statistics Division, Office for National Statistics.

Follow Population Statistics Division on Twitter @RichPereira_ONS
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2. Sexual orientation in the UK

In 2019, the proportion of the UK population aged 16 years and over identifying as heterosexual or straight decreased from an estimated 94.6% in 2018 to 93.7% in 2019 (an estimated 49.9 million). This represents a continuation of the decreasing trend since 2015, when 95.2% of the population identified themselves as heterosexual or straight (Table 1).

An estimated 1.4 million people aged 16 years and over (2.7% of the UK population) identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) in 2019, an increase from 1.2 million (2.2%) in 2018. The LGB population comprised 1.6% identifying as gay or lesbian and 1.1% as bisexual (Figure 1).

Between 2018 and 2019, there was an increase in those who stated "Don't know" or refused to answer, from 2.5% to 3.0% (1.6 million).

Figure 1: Compared with 2018, a lower proportion of people identified as heterosexual and a higher proportion identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual in 2019

Change in self-identified sexual orientation, UK, 2018 to 2019

Source: Office for National Statistics - Annual Population Survey

Notes:

1. Quality measures (including confidence intervals and coefficient of variation) for the estimates are displayed within the reference tables.

2. Totals may not sum due to rounding.

Download this chart

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In 2019, the proportion of men identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) increased from 2.5% to 2.9% (754,000) and women identifying as LGB rose from 2.0% to 2.5% (677,000) (see Figure 2). Men (2.1%) were almost twice as likely than women (1.1%) to identify as gay or lesbian. Conversely, women (1.4%) were more likely than men (0.8%) to identify as bisexual. This represents a continuation of trends observed since 2014.

Figure 2: Men are more likely to identify as gay or lesbian, while women are more likely to identify as bisexual

Lesbian, gay or bisexual population by sex, UK, 2019

Source: Office for National Statistics - Annual Population Survey

Notes:

1. Quality measures (including confidence intervals and coefficient of variation) for the estimates are displayed within the reference tables.

2. Totals may not sum due to rounding.

Download this chart

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Of all age groups, younger people (aged 16 to 24 years) were most likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) in 2019 (an estimated 459,000, or 6.6% of 16 to 24 year olds, an increase from 4.4% in 2018). People aged 16 to 24 years who identify as LGB continue to be more likely to identify as bisexual than as lesbian or gay. However, for other age groups it is more common to identify as lesbian or gay than bisexual.

The proportion of the UK population identifying as LGB in 2019 decreased with each consecutive age group. A greater proportion of the LGB population are aged 16 to 24 years compared with the population as a whole, with almost one-third of people identifying as LGB falling into this age group (Figure 3). Possible reasons for this pattern are that younger people could be more likely to explore their sexuality, combined with more social acceptability of different sexual identities and the expression of these today.

However, for the first time, older people (aged 65 years and over) also showed an increase in those identifying as LGB. This rose from 0.7% in 2018 to 1.0% in 2019 of this age category (120,000, from a population of 12.0 million).

Figure 3: Younger people are more likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) than older age groups

Lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) population by age and sex, UK, 2019 and UK population by age and sex, 2019

Notes:

1. Quality measures (including confidence intervals and coefficient of variation) for the estimates are displayed within the datasets which accompany this release.

2. Totals may not sum due to rounding.

Download the data
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5. UK countries and English regions

Between 2018 and 2019, the estimated proportion of people who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) increased for England (2.7%, up from 2.3%) and Scotland (2.7%, up from 2.0%). Wales (2.9%) and Northern Ireland (1.3%) remained stable. The overall UK proportion in 2019 was 2.7%, which has increased from 2.2% in 2018.

In 2019, the proportion of people within each English region identifying as LGB ranged from 3.8% in London to 2.1% in the east of England (Figure 4). Of the nine regions, only London showed a statistically significant difference in the proportion of people identifying as LGB to the other regions, which may be partly explained by the younger age structure of the London population.

The only regions in England to show a statistically significant change since 2018 were London (from 2.8% to 3.8%) and the south east (from 2.2% to 2.9%).

Figure 4: In 2019, a lower proportion of people in Northern Ireland identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) than in other UK countries and a higher proportion did so in London than in other English regions

UK constituent countries and English regions by lesbian, gay or bisexual population, 2019

Notes:

1. Confidence intervals are presented on the chart to give an estimated range of values within which the actual value is likely to fall 95% of the time.

2. Figures for Northern Ireland are based on relatively small sample sizes, which produce less reliable estimates. Further information on estimates of the population numbers and measures of quality (to show the levels of uncertainty associated with survey estimates) are presented in the datasets which accompany this release.

3. Totals may not sum due to rounding.

Download the data
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6. Legal partnership status

Among those identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) in 2019, more than two-thirds (68.8%) were single, meaning that they had never married or entered into a civil partnership. This is double the proportion of those who identified as heterosexual or straight and had never entered into a legal partnership (34.4%). A possible reason for this difference is the younger age structure of the LGB population combined with the increase in the average age of marriage.

Furthermore, legal unions for same-sex couples have only become available relatively recently; civil partnerships were introduced for same-sex couples in the UK in December 2005, and same-sex marriage has been available in England, Wales and Scotland since 2014 and in Northern Ireland from 2020.

Figure 5: People identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) are most likely to have a marital status of single (never married or civil partnered)

Lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) population by legal marital status, UK, 2015 to 2019

Source: Office for National Statistics - Annual Population Survey

Notes:

1. The Marriages (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 made provision for the marriage of same sex couples in England and Wales from 29th March 2014 onwards. The Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2014 made provision for the marriage of same sex couples in Scotland from 31 December 2014 onwards. The Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act 2019 made provisions for the marriage of same-sex couples and civil partnerships of opposite sex couples from 13 January 2020 onwards.

2. The Civil Partnership Act 2004 made provision for civil partnerships of same sex couples in the UK and was amended to make provision for civil partnerships of opposite sex couples in England and Wales from 31 December 2019 onwards.

3. Single is defined as never married or civil partnered. Married includes separated.

4. Quality measures (including confidence intervals and coefficient of variation) for the estimates are displayed within the reference tables.

5. Totals may not sum due to rounding.

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7. Sexual orientation data

Sexual orientation, UK
Dataset | Released 27 May 2021
Sexual orientation in the UK from 2012 to 2019 by region, sex, age, marital status, ethnicity and National Statistics Socio-economic Classification.

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Sexual orientation

"Sexual orientation" is an umbrella term that encompasses sexual identity, attraction and behaviour. The Annual Population Survey (APS) question informing the statistics in this publication is designed to capture sexual identity. The question was not designed for specific or detailed studies of sexual attraction or behaviour where a series of more detailed questions and answer categories might be more appropriate.

Sexual identity

The measurement of sexual identity (PDF 116KB) has been identified as the component of sexual orientation most closely related to experiences of disadvantage and discrimination. Sexual identity does not necessarily reflect sexual attraction and/or sexual behaviour, which are separate concepts not currently measured by the Annual Population Survey (APS). Sexual identity may change over time.

Sexual orientation categorised as "other"

The "other" category captures people who do not consider themselves to fit into the heterosexual or straight, bisexual, gay, or lesbian categories. It might also include people who responded "other" for different reasons such as those who did not understand the terminology or who are against categorisation.
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Sexual orientation estimates are based on data from the Annual Population Survey (APS), which collects information on self-perceived sexual identity from the household population aged 16 years and over in the UK. The household population excludes people living in communal establishments, with the exception of those in NHS housing and students in halls of residence (sampled via the private households of their parents).

Revision

The adjustment to the estimates for 2014 to 2017, to remove the artificially increased number of "don't know or refuse" responses to interviews carried out by field interviewers using a mobile phone, has also been applied to the estimates for 2018 and 2019. Further information on these revisions is available in the Sexual Orientation Quality and Methodology Information.

More detailed information on the sexual identity question and design of the APS is available in the Labour Force Survey user guide.

Change of terminology

In 2019 (publication of the 2017 data), the terminology in this release changed from "sexual identity" to "sexual orientation" to align with legislation ( Equality Act 2010); please see the Glossary for definitions.

Although the terminology changed, the data source and methodology used to produce the estimates were not changed and remained consistent with previous years.
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10. Strengths and limitations

Sexual orientation estimates have a number of uses, both direct and indirect, informing policy decisions at a national level. The estimates are mainly used to provide evidence and to inform the monitoring of the Equality Act 2010, alongside providing estimates of the lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) population for service providers.

This bulletin presents the sexual orientation estimates as percentages. Estimates of the population numbers and measures of quality (to show the levels of uncertainty associated with survey estimates) are presented in the datasets. We advise users to consult the quality measures when interpreting the estimates because some estimates are based on a relatively small sample. As a result, these estimates are subject to uncertainty particularly when making comparisons, such as changes from one year to another. In this bulletin, such comparisons are statistically significant unless otherwise stated. This means that there is likely to have been a real change in the underlying population proportions and that the difference we are observing is unlikely to be a result of chance.

More quality and methodology information on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in the Sexual Orientation Quality and Methodology Information.
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Sexual orientation, UK - Office for National Statistics

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The proportion of the UK population aged 16 years and over identifying as heterosexual or straight decreased from 94.6% in 2018 to 93.7% in 2019. An estimated 2.7% of the UK population aged 16 years and over identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) in 2019, an increase from 2.2% in 2018.

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How PC Music defined a new kind of pop (Interview A. G. Cook, SOPHIE, Charli XCX) | Arte TRACKS

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Understanding Popular Music Culture by Roy Shuker

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Understanding Popular Music Culture by Roy Shuker

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Buy Understanding Popular Music Culture 5 by Shuker, Roy (ISBN: 9781138907850) from Amazon’s Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

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Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital by Sarah Thornton

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Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital by Sarah Thornton

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Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital

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Buy Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital 1 by Thornton, Sarah (ISBN: 9780745614434) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

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Bubblegum sweet, razor sharp and deliriously chaotic, the genre – if it even is one – is responsible for some of the most vibrant, strange pop in the country

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Bubblegum sweet, razor sharp and deliriously chaotic, the genre – if it even is one – is responsible for some of the most vibrant, strange pop in the country

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he music of the moment is not Billie Eilish's dark, whispered polemics; nor is it Justin Bieber's beatific R&B, or Tones & I's helium-voiced hollering. The sound that defines the pandemic era is bubblegum sweet and razor sharp; deliriously loud and disorientatingly nonlinear. It's a chaotic vortex of pre-existing sounds ratcheted up to the extreme, and moulded into something that reflects our industrial, internety present and future.

It's hyperpop: a booming, blossoming microgenre that's fast establishing itself as the nucleus of 2020s pop in Australia and beyond.

Hyperpop is hard to define - but you know it when you hear it. The sound has origins in the work of late producer and performer Sophie and PC Music founder AG Cook, who gained notoriety around 2013 for the rubbery, nonporous tracks they were making, which sounded more like pots and pans clattering in the other room.

The genre has evolved since, and is typified now by the music of pop star-turned-avant-garde hero Charli XCX and the surrealist electronic duo 100 Gecs. A young American contingent is pushing it into a more visceral, less cerebral place, as influenced by pop-punk and rap as it once was by trance and Europop. The term itself first gained prominence after an official Spotify playlist catalogued the sound; now, "hyperpop" is a nexus point of a more disparate scene, an important platform for some and a bugbear for others.

Epitomised in the music of artists such as Oh Boy, Ninajirachi, Donatachi, Cookii, Perto, Daine, Muki, and Banoffee (you will find a lot of "ie" sounds in hyperpop), Australia's take on the genre is variegated and contested. At the same time, it's producing some of the most vibrant and delightfully strange pop in the country.

Nina Wilson, a Central Coast-born producer who records as Ninajirachi, was one of Australia's first notable hyperpop artists. A Triple J Unearthed High finalist in 2017, Wilson's music is glassy and exhilarating, drawing in club influences alongside the bright, exaggerated sound. Her latest release, a collaborative record with Kota Banks titled True North, is a neat, distinctive document of the genre's local form.

True North by Ninajirachi and Kota Banks is a 'distinctive document of the genre's local form'. Photograph: Billy Zammit

Wilson was in year 10 doing work experience at Sydney community station FBI Radio when she first heard Sophie. She'd just begun to try her hand at songwriting and production; it was a formative moment.

Around the same time, collectives like Sidechains - a Sydney club night and FBI show - and Nina Las Vegas' NLV Records were bringing the sound into clubs and radio mixes. "I had just turned 17 when [Sidechains] ran the Sophie show at Hudson Ballroom and I was so gutted [that I was underage]," Wilson says. "From what I've heard from friends, like Oh Boy and Donatachi, their parties were the best thing at the time."

Through collaborations with higher-profile artists such as Brisbane-born star Mallrat and American hyperpop upstart Slayyyter, Donatachi has become one of Australia's better-known hyperpop producers. "We were listening to a lot of [AG Cook's label] PC Music, and it kind of all stemmed from there," they tell me. "It was really born from a similar idea to what PC Music had: all the kind of obnoxious elements of Top 40 pop, but dialled up to 11."

Donatachi hears a certain levity and playfulness that is specific to hyperpop in Australia. "Hyperpop is taken less seriously here, so the artists making it [do too]," they explain. "I'm a bit self-deprecating as it is, so I don't want to make the music I'm making sound super serious - I guess almost as a way of protecting myself from a letdown if people don't like it."

'Hyperpop is taken less seriously [in Australia], so the artists making it do too': Donatachi. Photograph: etcetc

Two of the genre's younger artists are poised to take it more mainstream. Sydney producer Perto and Melbourne singer-songwriter Daine have both signed to Warner Music Australia, the genre's major label of choice due to its associations with Charli XCX and 100 Gecs; and each artist puts their own spin on the sound, with Perto's music touching on EDM and Daine's taking cues from emo rap progenitors like Lil Peep and Wicca Phase Springs Eternal.

Upon the release of her latest single Boys Wanna Txt, produced by 100 Gecs' Dylan Brady, Daine became one of the first Australians to grace the cover of Spotify's hyperpop playlist - a coup for any emerging artist. Still, she's not so sure her music aligns with the scene itself.

"It was never really hyperpop, for me - I think I stumbled into association with that. It's really confusing, and, like, I don't get it," Daine says. To her, "hyperpop" is a term useful only in its ability to put brackets around a style that's constantly evolving and extremely broad. "I think if you're young and you have a DIY ethos, and an eclectic sound that can be mistaken for parodying pop music, you'll quickly get the word 'hyperpop' thrown at you."

Daine considers herself "socially" part of the hyperpop scene that has blossomed online: Twitter, which lends itself to shitposting and abrupt tonal shifts, is analogous to how the music itself sounds, and the genre's luminaries congregate there. But she says the term itself "is largely rejected and controversial".

"Artists feel that they're lumped into this loose genre term when they have alternative influences, and they don't want to be painted with a pop tinge," she says. Although she doesn't feel her music necessarily warrants the tag, she doesn't think it's a wholly bad thing: "I think it's created a lot of room for people to experiment and still feel like they have mainstream appeal, because it's been such a prolific genre."

The bubble may have already burst. Daine believes that hyperpop is "kind of on its way out ... I [don't] think that the same level of excitement around the genre is gonna hang around forever," she says. But for the artists themselves, it's a different story: "I think they're all gonna keep making incredible music. Whether people perceive that as hyperpop is just a question of time."

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'Everything's dialled up to 11': meet Australia's rising stars of hyperpop

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he music of the moment is not Billie Eilish's dark, whispered polemics; nor is it Justin Bieber's beatific R&B, or Tones & I's helium-voiced hollering. The sound that defines the pandemic era is bubblegum sweet and razor sharp; deliriously loud and disorientatingly nonlinear.

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SOPHIE has explored the notion of physical materials across both her music and visual art: latex, plastics, metallics, etc.. At the same time, with the 90s/Y2K revival we've seen these same materials come back into fashion.

I would like to discuss how PC Music and SOPHIE's impact recontextualizes some of the fashion trends that we see on artists like Kim and Charli.
Latex/plastic
This is pretty straightforward, plastic has been explored by SOPHIE from the beginning. From the iconic slides from her first string of singles to the dress &amp; gloves she dons on her cover for OOEPUI, SOPHIE has used plastic as a celebration of the artificial.

Another artist who has explored this idea of materials in her music videos is Kim Petras. Her 'Heart to Break' video explores vulnerability with the use of fragile glass and crystals. A more interesting example, however, is 'Faded'. In the video, Kim dresses in various outfits made entirely of various synthetic, plastic materials. The set is littered with seemingly random props as well, a plastic throne on a plastic tarp, plastic awning on safety cones, a plastic shopping cart. She stands atop a platform of plastic water bottles.

As another openly trans pop artist, Kim has a lot of the same things to say as SOPHIE does in the embrace of the artificial. Beyond implications of personal identity, there lies something to say when pop stars embrace their own artificiality and take away the power from their critics to write them off as superficial and fake.

In a similar fashion, Charli has also explored latex and vinyl plastic in her looks. One particular type of outfit that comes to mind are the clear, vinyl dresses and track suits she wore opening for Taylor Swift's Reputation Tour.

As explored across the music industry, it's no question that sex sells. (Charli even has a sex-worker power anthem, 'Dirty Sexy Money'. Do pop stars have a sex-worker relationship with the masses? Anywaays..) Beyond sex appeal, however, Charli is famously candid with her fans and the media. She posts unflattering pics of herself, she talks about not being able to sing without auto-tune in interviews, she's flubbed 'Lucky' at a performance I saw her at, only to apologize after and explain that she lost her voice from partying the night before.. In another context, plastic can take on a different meaning, one of transparency. In the age of fake news and social media, how does the yearning for transparency from the public shape what we desire from our pop stars? Curiously, another material being seen in pop star fashion is another transparent fabric, tulle.
Metallics
Another material explored both in the art of PC Music and affiliates are metallics. SOPHIE is quite famous for this, even being referred to jokingly as the "cling clang bitch" by pop stans. The vinyl sleeves of PC Music Vol. 1 &amp; 2 are done in a metallic silver.

One interesting use that comes to mind is the collaboration with PC Music and Chinese pop star Chris Lee. In the music video for "Real Love / Only You", she wears various metallic garments. For any pop star, this is simply functional. It's shiny, it grabs attention. However, the video goes on to explore the various properties of light: how it refracts into rainbows and prismatic illusions, but more glaringly obvious, how it is reflective. As Chris wanders through the maze of mirrors, the light bounces off the walls and then, off of her. As much as we want to witness the spectacle of the pop star, dazzling under show lights, are we searching for a reflection of ourselves, as well? What is the appeal of TV talent shows such as American Idol or the Chinese equivalent that allowed Chris to rise to fame in her country?

The need to see ourselves in the media, the need to be represented has largely fueled the popularity that PC Music and affiliates have gained. SOPHIE has expressed on the Grammy's red carpet that she is focusing on collaborating with artists that are underrepresented in the media. Charli's music videos from "Vroom Vroom" onward showcase diversity and inclusion in an unforced fashion. Her countless collaborations with underrepresented artists speak volumes, as well. Her live shows have also used the stage as a platform to showcase many queer artists and local drag performers. And her FORM Arcosanti show with AG Cook and SOPHIE ends with an invitation to the crowd onto the stage. The stage for Go West Fest even had mirrors on it. Should popular music, by definition, be of the people? Or..... PC?

Are there any other materials being explored by PC Music? How are they being used? Are we material boys and girls or immaterial boys and girls?

(Big thanks to anyone who read my TED talk where I didn't let go of the mic even though they told me my time was up and dragged me off the stage. I took my time putting all my ideas over the years together into this post because I've noticed a shift in the PC Music fandom and a cynicism towards some of the more mainstream artists PC Music has become associated with. Just a reminder that the art PC Music is doing is still there if you look for it. :) )

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SOPHIE has explored the notion of physical materials across both her music and visual art: latex, plastics, metallics, etc.. At the same time, with the 90s/Y2K revival we've seen these same materials come back into fashion. I would like to discuss how PC Music and SOPHIE's impact recontextualizes some of the fashion trends that we see on artists like Kim and Charli.

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PC Music: Fashion in Pop from pcmusic

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THE TEN MOST INFLUENTIAL SUBCULTURES OF THE DECADE

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THE TEN MOST INFLUENTIAL SUBCULTURES OF THE DECADE

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Highsnobiety's founder David Fischer told Digiday in 2017, "Subculture is the new pop culture." And he's right.

From the start, youth subcultures have been in constant conversation with mainstream society, appropriating and remixing its products to their own ends. And though it's common to assign political aims to subcultures, they're not always necessary either. Subcultures can and do exist without overt political identities. They don't need to stand for something or even stand against something. They just need to stand apart, separating themselves from the mainstream by taking aspects of that culture and subverting them in ways that create meaning for participants and members.

That's why sneakerheads, for example, are just as much of a subculture as punks. Sneakerheads take something with a specific intended use and repurpose it to their own needs, subverting its original meaning without political intentions. Take Jordan 11s, sneakers designed to be worn for basketball. They're performance shoes right down to the full-length carbon fiber plates in their soles. So, when a sneakerhead repurposes Jordan 11s as a fashion statement, an icon of commodity fetishization, and a marker of community identity, that original athletic intention has been subverted.

The mainstream wears Jordan 11s for basketball, but sneakerheads wear them as an emblem, creating a whole web of meaning around them that exists outside of athletics. And that's the essence of a subculture.

With that dynamic in mind, we've rounded up the ten most influential subcultures of the 2010s, showing how groups as disparate as skaters and cowboys, goths, and scumbros exercised outsize influence on cultural conversations and fashion trends during this strangest of decades.

Check out the most impactful subcultures of the past decade.

When Highsnobiety founder David Fischer mentioned subcultures to Digiday, he was talking about sneakerheads and hypebeasts, two distinct but intertwined subcultures united by a love of limited drops and rare drip. And though both sneakerheads and hypebeasts date to the 1990s and 2000s, decades which saw them lining up along downtown New York streets in hopes of copping Pigeon Dunks or rare Supreme collaborations, they truly took over during the 2010s.

During this decade, sneakerheads and hypebeasts changed not only youth culture, but also high fashion, influencing staid European labels like Gucci to adopt graphic-heavy, active-inspired clothing and limited drop releases, while sending Virgil Abloh, one of their own, to the pinnacle of success as the first Black artistic director at Louis Vuitton. Streetwear has infiltrated and defined the new luxury market.

Beyond that, sneakerheads and hypebeasts pioneered online reselling, making the notion of buying rare items to "flip" for a profit more mainstream. Flipping became so popular and lucrative during the 2010s, that it inspired a whole new business sector, spurring the creation of sneaker reselling platform StockX and growing apps like DePop into international phenomena, all while injecting sneakerhead and hypebeast slang into mainstream conversations.

Now one's middle-aged mother is just as likely to know what "grail" means in this context as your 14-year-old cousin is. And that's huge. Over the past decade, it's clear, sneakerheads and hypebeasts made the world their own. This modern subculture is probably not going anywhere anytime soon.

Skaters

Like it or not, hypebeasts and sneakerheads are also responsible for the popular influence of skateboarders on fashion during the 2010s, showing the world there was a market for skate-specific footwear and clothing far away from the local ledge spot or plaza. Though real skaters kept things core, looking at fashion's interest in their culture with wary eyes, some couldn't help but spread skate culture and clothing around the world via their other interests.

Enter rap supergroup Odd Future and Tyler the Creator, their skateboarding figurehead, who broke out in 2011, bringing Supreme, Vans Old-Skools, Thrasher hoodies, Huf weed socks, and eventually their own Golf Wang line to the masses. Their success, as well as huge skate videos like Supreme's "cherry" and Lil Wayne's embrace of skateboarding in his 30s, inspired both high fashion fans and other hip hop artists to adopt and produce skate-inspired gear. Thrasher hoodies were particularly popular, appearing in Vogue and on the backs of celebs like Rihanna.

That market saturation forced now-deceased Thrasher editor Jake Phelps to announce that his magazine didn't send boxes of gear to celebs like Justin Bieber. During the 2010s, Kanye West also dressed daughter North West in skatewear staples like Thrasher and Supreme, before releasing the Yeezy 500, an adidas runner that looked just like an éS Scheme, a puffy-shoe icon that first dropped in 2001. That release seemed to spark a frenzy for old-skate-shoe-inspired kicks, with A$AP Rocky working with Under Armour to create the SRLo, a high-concept sneaker that drew obvious inspiration from Osiris's D3 skate shoe.

Now, this subculture seems to be going full circle, with original 2010s skate-influencer Tyler the Creator popping up this month to unveil the GOLF le FLEUR* x Converse Gianno, a puffy trail shoe that also recalls the late '90s phatest skate kicks, including yes, the D3.

Normcore

Ah yes, normcore. You probably remember it. Though satirical trend forecasting K-Hole came up with the term to refer to the novel concept of rebellion through fitting in, normcore didn't blow up until a 2014 New York Magazine article came out detailing how downtown New York scenesters were dressing like suburban moms and dads. From there, it created a firestorm, as mainstream press and actual normies couldn't even conceive of something so seemingly stupid actually existing, while the cool kids-the actual normcore adherents-rejected the term, almost embarrassed at being called out flexing in their white runners, turtlenecks, Crocs, and light-wash jeans.

The young and hip never like to be identified as such, with that kind attention piercing their carefully crafted aloof rebellion. And though the term "normcore" flamed out fast, its influence was massive, affecting fashion and style throughout the 2010s. In normcore's wake, mom jeans and dadcore became huge trends, with the latter aesthetic holding sway over vast swaths of cultural territory, from skaters to high fashion runways, where Balenciaga's Demna Gvasalia made it one of his hallmarks.

Gvasalia dedicated his entire spring 2018 show to the dadcore, while selling loads of chunky, artfully smudged Triple S runners. But that's not all. Shia LaBeouf's intuitive normcore style would also make him a street style star and unexpected Kanye muse, setting the stage for normcore-inspired style subcultures like "scumbro" to emerge later in the decade.

Seapunk

In the past, most subcultures formed in the streets. Now, many form online. And seapunk was a leader in this space as one of the first online subcultures to make it big. But before it went online though, it emerged in a dream. In 2011, video director Lil Internet dreamed about a leather jacket crusted in barnacles instead of metal studs, tweeting about it as soon as he woke up. From there, artist, Lil Internet associate, and Twitter personality Lil Government tweeted #seapunk out into the world with a wink and a nod, where it would be picked up by the New York art pranksters at Dis magazine and teens on Tumblr, before exploding into the wider world.

Eventually, the seapunk aesthetic, which included plenty of aqua, green, and oceanic iconography like shells and dolphins, appeared up on everyone from Rihanna to Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj to Katy Perry, and of course, Frank Ocean himself. Eventually, seapunk's aesthetic and its related musical genres like vaporwave grew so big even cultural gatekeeper's like The New York Times took notice, covering the subculture and eventually burning it out and, well, sinking it. But seapunk remains iconic as one of the first online subcultures to develop during the decade of smartphone-driven social media.

Roadmen

UK grime first appeared during the 2000s, as artists like London-born Dizze Rascal gave the world its first taste of truly original UK hip-hop. With its minimalist electro beats and vernacular rhymes, no one could mistake grime for a poor imitation of American hip hop. It was unique and it was totally English. Still, grime seemed to disappear from the global stage for a decade, bubbling along in the UK, before reemerging on the global stage in 2015 thanks to artists like Skepta and Stormzy. And a new style subculture also went global in conjunction with the grime renaissance. Alongside grime, the UK roadman, bedecked in tracksuits, technical outerwear, low profile caps, Air Max runners, and the omni-present shoulder bag would become a worldwide fashion obsession.

Roadman, English slang for young guys who hang out in the "roads," is akin to the American "corner dude," but it has a style all its own, updating traditional, sporty UK football casual style for the 21st century. No moment captured the intersection of UK grime and roadman style quite like Skepta's 2015 " Shutdown" video, which saw the emcee and his crew outfitted in enough minimalist sportswear to stock an entire boutique. Though the whole roadman look remains influential today, no item was bigger than the sidebag, a small sling or repurposed fanny pack worn over the shoulder, which was also adopted by skateboarders and active-influenced high fashion lines like Cottweiler and Y-3.

Drillers

Throughout hip hop's history, the Midwest sat outside the mainstream, doing its own thing while the East Coast beefed with the West and the South rose to global domination. Sure, there were outliers like Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony and Kanye West, but even they made their names by partnering with coastal superstars like Eazy-E and Jay Z. Perhaps that's what made Chicago's drill music so unexpected when it emerged around 2011. Coming directly out of the city's poorest South Side neighborhoods, drill spread as talented innovators like King Louie, Chief Keef, and Young Chop posted their work directly to Youtube.

With programs like Fruity Loops and high-resolution cameras increasingly available to all, Chicago drill was a true DIY movement, returning hip hop to an authentic gangster sensibility not seen since the emergence of Schooly D and N.W.A in the late '80s. Like trap, the 2010s' other great hip hop genre, drill relied on digital beats, synths, and distinctive snare sounds, but focused on a colder, more ruthless sound often accented with dark, theatrical strings and bells that echoed older Memphis tape rap.

Drillers like Chief Keef and Fredo Santana also boasted their own unique style, favoring skinny, low-slung True Religion jeans, Jordans, chains, flashy designer belts, and slim T-shirts and hoodies, even as other subcultures moved on to baggier clothing. Drill's sound and aesthetic also proved globally influential, moving from Chicago to Brooklyn and even London, where teenage street gangs used the music and its attendant Youtube videos to boast and taunt "opps," eventually leading to a moral panic in the UK where politicians tried to ban the genre. Sadly, drill's authenticity came at a price, with rappers like Lil Jojo and L'A Capone losing their lives to gun violence, while others, like Fredo Santana passing away due to drug abuse.

Despite those deaths, drill remains among the world's most important modern subcultures today.

Goth

Born in the 1970s, Goth never quite goes away. That might be because its morose, romantic outlook is the perfect encapsulation of teenage ennui. Or maybe it's because black looks good on everyone. Either way, goth was huge during the 2010s, inspiring all sorts of spinoffs and updates, from "street goth" to "health goth" and more. Goths of color fueled much of this creative expansion, as artists like DJ Venus X grew her GHE20G0TH1K parties from local New York phenomenon to global brand, inspiring rappers like A$AP Rocky to come along for the ride. Fashion designers, both new and old, also played a huge role in the 2010s goth explosion.

Hood by Air's Shane Oliver kept rappers, club kids, and celebrities dipped in his neo-goth hip hop gear, while high fashion elders like Rick Owens saw his career rise to new heights. Along the way, goth-made skaters and even rappers want to paint their nails, while inspiring a vast genre of "goth girlfriend" memes and think pieces online. And, as a testament to goth's staying power and importance during the 2010s, none other than Highsnobiety has recently predicted yet another goth comeback.

Yeehaw Agenda

History aficionados know that black people lived and worked in the American West from the start. Many were cowboys, with the range offering African Americans a level of freedom and decent pay that wasn't available in the East of the South. Until recently, that history had largely been forgotten in popular culture, though black cowboys never completely disappeared. Enter the "YeeHaw Agenda," a phrase coined by Texan Bri Malandro in the late 2010s to refer to the renewed popularity of Westernwear and cowboy chic among African Americans.

Though named by Malandro, the cowboy look had been bubbling up among African Americans for a minute, with designer Kerby Jean-Raymond casting the Compton Cowboys and Cowgirls of Color in his fall 2018 Pyer Moss "American Also" campaign. Later that year, Atlanta's Lil Nas X provided the YeeHaw Agenda with a theme song, releasing his hip hop-country mega-smash "Old Town Road," a tune that went viral thanks to the #YeeHawChallenge on TikTok.

Written off as a novelty hit by some, "Old Town Road" proved both incredibly durable and controversial, with Billboard deciding to take it off its Hot Country Songs charts despite its huge popularity. That didn't stop Lil Nas X or the song, as defenders like Billy Ray Cyrus hopped on the tune for remixes that helped "Old Town Road" go Diamond faster than any song in history, moving more than ten million total units in the U.S. alone. At the same time, celebs like Beyonce, Solange, and Megan Thee Stallion helped push the YeeHaw Agenda, adopting the cowboy look in what some saw as a repudiation of Trump's MAGA movement.

Scumbro

The scumbro subculture arose in 2018 at the confluence of Shia LaBeouf's normcore and skate style, as stylists like Karla Welch helped push the look on client Justin Bieber, just as other adherents like Jonah Hill, Pete Davidson, and John Mayer were seen dressing similarly out in the streets. Scumbro style is simple, a mix of skate hoodies, frat boy tie-dye, rare sneakers, and sweatpants worn with a dirtbag nonchalance. Adherents got bonus points if they could grow a wispy mustache.

The scumbro style helped make Jonah Hill an unexpected street style icon, as menswear fans lauded him for his newly independent look that mixed tie-dye and dad caps with Palace gear and new tattoos, just as his skate flick Mid90s gained him acclaim as a director. Scumbro also made Pete Davidson a style icon, as he rode his scumbro look and high profile-relationship with Ariana Grande right into a modeling gig in Alexander Wang's Collection 1 2020 fashion show. Though some publications say scumbro died in 2018, it's scruffy grooming, tie-dye shirts, and scuzzy dad caps remain popular with aspiring dirtbags today.

Eboys

Despite their recent outsize influence on pop culture and mainstream fashion, subcultures remain largely teenage concerns. So it's fitting that teenagers created the final subculture on this list. Just squeaking in towards the end of decade, Eboys and Egirls emerged on Chinese social media app TikTok, where Gen Z has flocked to participate in hashtagged challenges and silly lipsyncing videos. Though the trend is for the young, it harkens back to subcultures of the past, combining elements of '90s grunge with 2000s skater style, MySpace scene kids flare, and even Hot Topic mall goth gloom.

Among the "E," both genders paint their nails, favoring long-sleeved striped T-shirts worn under black graphic tees, all tucked into jeans styled with plenty of wallet chains. Egirls notably wear distinctive eye makeup too, often adding hearts or other small symbols to their cheeks. On the whole, the look reminds viewers that even among the newest subcultures, elements of the past remain important, with young people mixing and matching them to fit the current zeitgeist, in a feedback loop that's unlikely to ever end. If you're feeling inspired, perhaps it's time to level up your wardrobe?

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The Ten Most Influential Subcultures of the Decade

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The trends of the 2000s were largely defined by its most dominant style tribes. Here are the ones that really led the pack in terms of sheer influence.