Pop is a weirdly deceptive way to describe any type of music. In the broadest sense, it just means music that is popular. In its modern meaning, basically, any kind of recorded music outside of classical music gets thrown under the pop umbrella.
But there’s a more narrow definition of pop music, one that makes it a particular type of popular music. Pop music, at least the way we think of it today, usually refers to some offshoot of dance-pop, the kind of music Madonna and Cyndi Lauper brought out of the clubs and into the mainstream in the early 80s. That thread ran through the boyband era and into the twenty-first century during which pop music and EDM became interchangeable (almost all pop music has elements of EDM in it, though by no means is all EDM pop music).
If you’ve read this newsletter with any regularity, you’ve probably seen me throw around the word hyperpop to describe certain artists. Broadly speaking, hyperpop is digitally made pop music with a very online aesthetic. In practice, that definition has narrowed somewhat. Most (but not all!) hyperpop tracks tend to include purposely jarring production choices, electronically altered vocals, often sped up to obscure a singer’s gender a la nightcore, and an embrace of pop-culture’s ugly and forgotten trends.
Hyperpop was also notable for being a scene without a physical home. Traditionally new sounds tend to percolate among groups of artists operating in close proximity to one another (see: grunge in Seattle, LA’s beat scene, or even the entire 80s DIY underground who would share stages with one another on the indie club circuit). Being very online, hyperpop artists were instead working in conversation with their fans and one another through sites like Reddit and Discord. The genre’s massive expansion over the past two years, when artists weren't able to meet physically, only further speaks to the borderless nature of the music.
Despite throwing around the term rather loosely, its boundaries are still in flux as is its larger history. Nevertheless, I thought I’d take a stab at sketching out hyperpop’s story. I don’t claim that this is complete - there are a number of key releases from big-name artists that aren’t covered here. But I wanted to give a broad overview of how we got here over the past 20 years as opposed to a more granular look at the nuances of the genre. I’d love to hear from anyone who had thoughts as to what’s missing or flat-out wrong here.
2002-2005
By 2002 the teen pop era was in decline. While it had produced a number of jams, few would argue that producers like Max Martin had really broken any new musical ground (though that wouldn’t be the case for Martin for too long). That began to change when Kylie Minogue, a teen pop star from the previous generation, dropped Fever a massive international breakthrough for the veteran pop singer. Its lead single “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” was a pop earworm. But its retrofuturistic disco production was deeply rooted in club culture. That meeting of the mainstream and underground pop world presaged a lot of what would happen in the years to come.
Not that the millennial teen pop set was going to go quietly. Britney Spears continues to be a magnet for hot takes and opinions, most of which have little to do with her music. By 2003 her legend was already cemented, but “Toxic,” produced by Bloodshy and Avant and co-written by “Can’t Get You Out of My Head’s” Cathy Dennis, was the first time critics really rallied around one of her songs - it placed fifth on the Village Voice’s annual Pazz and Jop poll. Like 2001’s Neptunes-produced “I’m a Slave 4 U,” it showed that Britney worked best when paired with ambitious, dance music adjacent grooves.
By 2004, rock was back, but pop singers, and more notably for this essay producers and songwriters, pivoted whenever appropriate. Yet no song walked the pop-rock line quite as well as Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” Famously a re-write of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Maps” by Max Martin and Dr. Luke, the song turns the YYY’s understated chorus up to 11 and flips its searing bridge on its head. It was a smash on pop radio but had enough edge to win over rock fans skeptical of an American Idol winner muscling in (and absolutely blowing everyone away) on their turf.
This trio of tracks are, in my opinion, the foundational elements of poptimism, a movement among music journos and nerds to start applying a more critical eye to pop music as opposed to writing it off as corporate schlock standing in the way of Good Music (aka rockism). The whole thing is/was pretty navelgazey - 95% of music fans just like what they like and rarely think about the cultural implications around it. But I think this shift in mindset opened a lane for a new kind of pop artist.
2005
If the first half of the new century laid-the groundwork, 2005 was a major turning point. As I wrote back in the KKMC #4, my personal Come to Pop moment came from 2005’s self-titled Robyn record and Anniemal by Norwegian singer Annie. Both records were nominally pop in terms of form (verse, chorus, verse), instrumentation and presentation. But they didn’t feel like part of the pop zeitgeist (at least outside of Scandinavia), nor did they appear to be aspiring to either.
Robyn was a particularly curious case. As a teen, she rode the initial teen pop wave but had opted out of the international pop rat race by the end of the 90s. Though she’d released a couple of Swedish records, her 2005 record relaunched her career, thanks to some fawning reviews, including one from Pitchfork, then at the peak of its powers, and the ability and willingness of a dedicated group of music fans to pirate the record on torrent sites. Annie similarly benefitted from word of mouth, including the coveted seal of approval from Pitchfork.
2005 also saw MIA drop her debut album Arular, a collection of global-minded club bangers that felt like nothing else happening at the time. Like Robyn and Annie, she quickly found an audience eager for global sounds in a pop package.
It all added up to a curious new kind of pop star - the kind who was not popular, at least in the mainstream, mass appeal sense. This could not have happened without both the internet offering quick (often illegal) access to new sounds and a foundation of music fans willing to engage with pop music at a serious, critical level, something that even just five years prior did not exist.
2006-2010
This is where shit starts getting weird.
Depending on how you look at them, Swedish duo The Knife are either a synth-pop group with some experimental art leanings or an experimental electronic group who occasionally dip their toes in pop song structures. Either way their third album, Silent Shout, radically shifted what electronic pop music could be.
Karin Dreijer pushed the pop envelope even further on her first (and so far only) album as Fever Ray in 2009, inspiring a million emails from music publicists touting the next great “alt-pop” artist. It also saw the rise of more mainstream (at least in an underground music press sense) artists like Lykke Li and La Roux. Lady Gaga’s influence should’’t be discounted here either - though her music tends to fall in line with current trends, her aesthetics were a visual representation of what was to come.
2011-2013
Just as Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen is capturing the hearts of poptimists (and basically anyone else who went shopping at a grocery store) the world over with “Call Me Maybe” another Canadian singer started making waves with their second album. Visions, (preceded by a pivotal split EP with fellow Montrealer D’eon) announced Grimes to the world.
It can be difficult to recall given all that’s happened with Grimes over the past decade, but her music was really quite revolutionary at the time, standing at the nexus of pop, indie rock and experimental electronic music. It was certainly inspired by artists like the Knife, but you couldn’t dismiss her as a mere clone.
Charli XCX enters the chat with the release of True Romance in 2013.
2014-2016
This is hyperpop’s big bang era.
Taylor Swift 1989, Swift’s big (and successful!) pop gamble, played it safe musically speaking. But in making a pop record that embraced a particular sound, with 1989 Swift, arguably the biggest pop star of the decade, proved that pop’s natural centre had shifted towards maximalist electronic pop production.
While Swift was slowly hedging her way towards her pop breakthrough, left-of-centre producers like Rustie and Hudson Mohawke pushed this kind of music to new maximalist edges on their own records and their production for others.
Not to get too into the weeds too much, but microgenres like chiptune, glitchcore, vaporwave and more were popping up concurrent to the history I’ve outlined above. Artists like Crystal Castles or whatever Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never was doing, provide vital inspiration to many of the musicians who would take pieces of their sounds and make them their own.
But it was the emergence of A.G. Cook’s PC Music collective, which included Hannah Diamond, GFOTY and Danny L Harle among many others, and their close associate Sophie (who I wrote about shortly after their tragic death last year) that really started to codified what hyperpop would become. Their deeply influential PC Music Vol 1 compilation arrived in 2015. How elemental was this group of musicians? For several years there was no agreed-upon name of the kind of music they were making and folks tended to call anything that sounded remotely like it “pc music.”
The following year Charli XCX, fresh off the back-to-back success of her Iggy Azalea collab and her own Fault in the Stars banger teamed up with Sophie for a four-track EP called Vroom Vroom (I reviewed it at the time. I stand by what I wrote though I’d bump the number rating up to an 8) The record proved to be a game-changer for Charli who had, up until this point, come across as a very interesting if somewhat standard pop singer and songwriter. Through Sophie, Charli met A.G. Cook who became her primary collaborator and sounding board, drastically altering the arc of her career.
Sometime in 2018 (I think - it’s hard to tell when Spotify playlists were created) Charli launched her “The mutherfuckin future” Spotify playlist which became an important curatorial tool for highlighting hyperpop (still not called hyperpop!) and hyperpop-adjacent artists in the years to come.
2019
Two pivotal things happened in 2019. First, was the release of 100 Gecs’ debut full-length 1000 Gecs in May. Made up of Charli XCX collaborator Dylan Brady and Laura Les, the duo quickly become hyperpop’s centrifugal force and 1000 Gecs the prism through which all other artists making similar music are examined. Never had something so catchy, beautiful and ugly coexisted so perfectly. If a can of Monster Energy drink became a bedroom pop producer, this is the music it would make.
The other major development was the creation of Spotify’s Hyperpop editorial playlist in August, which might make “hyperpop” this generation’s “alternative rock” in terms of wholeheartedly accepting corporate branding for a scene. To be fair, a lot of folks prefer terms like digicore.
2020-2022
As mentioned at the top, hyperpop has flourished during the pandemic thanks, in part, to its rootless nature. This is music for the extremely online. Spotify’s playlist for the music has in some ways calcified what hyperpop can be as artists tweak their music to better suit the Algorithm. But that hasn’t stopped truly innovative artists from emerging.
glaive is one such musician. As I previously wrote, the North Carolina teenager’s tracks caught fire during the pandemic, landing him a deal with Interscope. Like fellow hyperpop artist midwxst, there’s some hip-hop swing to his music that works nicely with his penchant for writing sticky hooks. He just dropped the deluxe edition of his 2021 EP All Dogs Go to Heaven called Old Dog New Tricks.
Another is dltzk (pronounced “delete Zeke”) another teenage producer this time from New Jersey, who takes a much more lo-fi approach than a lot of his contemporaries, particularly on his most recent release frailty. It’s kind of like a bedroom pop take on hyperpop.
Kool Kids Self-promotion Club
Restrictions on live music venues were lifted at the beginning of the month here in Toronto and I’m trying to make the most of it. I recently attended my first show at the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern in over two years and wrote a little Twitter story about it (okay, it was for a communications strategy course that I’m taking, but it overlaps here, so I’m posting it).
More notably, at least for my bottom line, I also reviewed a live show for the first time since seeing Massive Attack in September 2019. Locals Packs headlined a gig at the Baby G with fellow Toronto group Triples and Mexico City-based Ryder the Eagle. Ryder in particular was a real treat. As I mentioned in my review, it’s been a long time since I’ve stumbled upon something weird and different in the wild, and Ryder the Eagle fit that bill to a tee.
Photo by Stephen McGill for Exclaim!
Kool Kids Music Recommendation Club
Alex Edkins, lead howler in Toronto noise punks (and longtime fav of mine) Metz, has a new project on the go. Weird Nightmare was recorded during the pandemic (it’s not a pandemic album he cautions) and finds Edkins leaning into his natural gifts for hooks and melody. There’s a full-blown album on the way from Metz’s label Sub Pop which features guest appearances from Chad VanGaalen and Bully’s Alicia Bognanno. “Searching for You,” the record’s first single, is a weird amalgam of Jay Reatard garage rock meets Sugar-style alt-rock. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.
Florida generally seems like a right-wing hellscape, but it’s managed to produce a lot of great music over the years. Case in point, Miami MC Denzel Curry marries the artier side of 2010s cloud-rap with classic rap songcraft. “Zatoichi” finds him teaming with UK rapper Slowthai to evoke the legendary blind swordsman. The track is built on a sample of “Amen, Brother,” by the Washington, DC soul group the Winstons and is dedicated to the group as well as members Richard Lewis Spencer (who also played with Otis Redding and Curtis Mayfield) and Gregory Coleman. “Zatoichi” is the second single from Melt My Eyez, See Your Future, which drops later this year.
“Pressure Cooker” is a groovy piece of angst courtesy of Richmond, VA one-man-band Dazy & LA’s Militarie Gun. The song is a nice combo of the former’s penchant for 90s alt-rock riffs and the former’s post-punk angst (that’s Militarie Gun members Nick Cogan, Vince Nguyen and Max Epstein in the background) as James Goodson and Ian Shelton spit venom about some unseen force slowing bearing down on them.
While we’re talking Dazy, I wanted to highlight their 2021 record MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD: The First 24 Songs. As the title suggests it is a collection of tunes that Dazy mastermind James Goodson has released up until now (or at least August 2021). Goodson, who also plays in Teen Death, makes music that combines the noise of 80s Jesus and Mary Chain with 90s UK alt-rock and presents it like a DIY hardcore band. What’s not to love?
Lots of collabs happening these days but this one is a particular gem. OMBIIGIZI sees Canadian Indigenous artists Zoon, whose album Bleached Waves was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize, and Status/Non-Status, formerly known as WHOOP-Szo, teaming up for an exploration of “their cultural histories through sound.” “Cherry Coke” the first single from their album Sewn Back Together showcases the two artists harnessing their respective strengths to create something new and beautiful.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions.