In the early days of the COVID lockdown, I started seeing silly tweets listing underground musicians that suggested you were washed-up if you didn’t know them. The unmissables included quinn, d0llywood1, midwxst, capoxxo, glaive—anarchic teens who at the time had only a few thousand followers, but would become the faces of the most thrilling musical movement of the decade so far. The pandemic synced up perfectly, giving them the time and a reason to pump out songs and experiment while trapped inside. Online collectives formed like digital lunch tables; artists scored TikTok hits and performed at virtual raves in video games. By the end of 2020, this sound—generally known as “digicore” or “hyperpop”—set Twitter ablaze with discourse and scored one of the buzziest Spotify playlists. Mainstream crossover was only a matter of time.
Looking back on it, none of these artists have soared in an enduring way. Many junked the “hyper” aspects of their sound altogether. The “pop” in hyperpop proved a total bust: the charts are smothered instead in country, trap that sounds stuck in the 2010s, and soft, zamboni-smooth pop. PC Music, the scene’s main kickstarters, disbanded in 2023. The style’s sonic hallmarks have leaked across the genre-spectrum—you can hear its imprint in hyper-rage, hyper-dubstep, hyper-phonk—yet there are barely any hyperpop stars. So what happened?
Hyperpop’s disappointing dispersal happened for a myriad of reasons—the conflicting visions of its practitioners, the end of the pandemic lockdown, and the fact that some of its most promising musicians didn’t want fame and actively recoiled from it. The scene was plagued by existential issues from the start; no one could even agree what to call it, let alone who the genre tag referred to. It was particularly confusing because there were multiple “eras”—the first wave surrounding PC Musicologists like Hannah Diamond, GFOTY, and A .G. Cook in the 2010s (often also called bubblegum bass), and then the swarm of pandemic teens (digicore), who were lumped into the descriptor despite making vastly different styles. It morphed into a kind of Frankensteinian macro-genre, referring to an array of internet artists who down genres like cocktails and love the fuck out of Auto-Tune.
Hyperpop became the most convenient catch-all tag for the music, partly out of convenience and because Spotify aped it for a popular editorial playlist based on the scene. This, in turn, caused people to desert the label in droves, furious that a streaming service had the power to dictate who got popular or vexed that new artists making emo rap and other genre-fusions were included. Some artists have called the label a slur. “what is hyperpop?” went the infamous Charli XCX tweet from summer 2020. If the original ’90s shoegaze was the scene that celebrated itself, hyperpop is the scene that denies its own existence, perpetually locked in an identity crisis like a passive-aggressive teen. People have been calling hyperpop “dead” since 2020, when the music was arguably at its creative peak. Now, if not outright dead, hyperpop feels like a distorted, feeble echo of what it once was. O.G. scenester angelus is talking about “bringing back hyperpop” like we’ve already been through the 20-year nostalgia cycle.
Hyperpop was always backflipping on the edge of addictive and abrasive, which was what made it so electrifying but also off-putting to normie audiences. In the mid-2010s, PC Music pushed pop to the brink by imagining a fictional persona who was like an MK Ultra’d popstar, with supermoon-bright vocals and pixel-sharp beats. SOPHIE made the most eerily poignant anthems about gender fluidity and selfhood in the digital era, like “Faceshopping”—a song that chops and shatters as their face melts and mutates in the video. Artists like Fraxiom used hyperpop’s pitched-up vocal aesthetic to explore their identity. Newer artists like quinn and Jane Remover deployed Auto-Tuned caterwauls and cathartic breakbeats to express the all-consuming anguish of adolescent heartbreak and dysphoria. The music rewired puerile shitposts into wonderfully wacko genre experiments, helped people understand their queerness, and carved out a sweet pocket of supportive collaboration at a time of worldwide crisis and ennui. It sparked real-life events like Subculture, whose stacked shows unfurl like hyperpop wonderlands, packed with Y2K goths, neon furries, drag shows, and Auto-Tune mosh zones.
In many ways, the pandemic was a crucial catalyst of the scene, and the end of the lockdown was its undoing. While some of the artists were already making music before, the forced social distancing chained kids to their bedrooms; all they had to pass the time was music-making and watching Charli XCX and 100 gecs’ Minecraft Square Garden set with friends online. Most of the scene’s essential canon came from these early months: the shimmering meltdown of kuru and kurtains’ “clueless,” the ruthless fever dream of midwxst, quinn, and wido’s “Troops.” There’s ericdoa’s spasming, pixel-spitting “movinglikeazombie.” 8485’s “1:15” feels like cybernetic butterflies are fluttering in your chest. They culled from a mystery treasure chest of sounds like plugg, EDM, and drum’n’bass but defaced and remade them into exquisite corpses, adding mad distortion, heavily-filtered whimpers, and ridiculous stutters. Tracks like “Spawn Camping” and “threat” were made by kids who obviously grew up on CS:GO and Roblox, capturing the kiddie dysfunction of MMORPGs and shooter games. I couldn’t believe it when I heard “Fuck Notch, Fuck Musk, and I’ll piss on Zedd” in Fraxiom and Gupi’s shitpost anthem “Thos Moser.”
Earnest songwriting, endless memes, freely oscillating between genre and gender—these were the clearest qualities uniting the young upstarts. They were born fully online, the gleefully fried children of Club Penguin and Dark Souls III and PictoChat and Discord VCs. But their music was also melancholy, the sounds of digital avatars malfunctioning and blue-screening out, unsure how to exist in this new landscape of internet clout and pandemic-stunted adolescence. glaive’s “sick” hit like an aural potion in the early pandemic months, its joyously pixelated plucks cheering me up while he wailed relatably about feeling like he’s “wasting all the bandwidth, sick and overstimulated, neurons in my brain filled with information.” The paranoid skitter of quinn’s “ok i’m cool” was simultaneously worrying as a listener but also riveting as she mashed breakbeats with raw confessions about feeling like the entire world was against her.
What struck me most were the posse cuts, which sometimes featured so many people, like noki’s legendary “Among Us Cypher”—16!—or scruff’s “scru cypher 3,” which might have the world record for features at 120 people that they couldn’t fit in a YouTube video title. Most older spectators might think it’s depressing that kids now spend all day tinkering on FL Studio and recreating full-instrument sounds instead of forming garage bands with friends in real-life. But these musicians were intensely collaborative, and they weren’t pretentious or withholding about letting people hop on. They traded files over chat and helped boost each other’s posts. Rather than wait months or years to link up in real-life, they churned out massive collabs like endie’s blood-soaked “smackdown,” which switches verses every 30 seconds like a class show-and-tell sesh: there’s midwxst, ericdoa, aldn, funeral, chach, blackwinterwells, doxia, and (breath) kmoe. The implicit ideal was that everyone would glow up together, leaving no one behind.
As COVID restrictions eased up, the scene’s raison d’être ceased to be, and the artists were growing up and graduating high school. Collectives disputed internally or withered out of inactivity. The scene’s biggest players, like midwxst, glaive, and ericdoa, were picked up by major labels and mostly stopped working with their Discord pals. Others posted less frequently, either because real-life demanded their attention or they wanted to focus on full-length albums. Scene lynchpin quinn momentarily deleted all of her music, exhausted by the attention; she told me in 2021 that she was “envious” and “felt robbed” that former hyperpop friends had stolen her swag, and later that she was frustrated the scene’s trans origins were increasingly being marginalized.
The scene fractured, and there weren’t many mondo albums dropping to inspire people to keep making pure hyperpop. The original pioneers were mostly busy making non-hyperpop or gone: SOPHIE tragically died in 2021; 100 gecs spent years toiling to make their zany stadium-rock second album. There were still genius oddities here and there—the wistful video gamey emo of Jane Remover’s Teen Week/Frailty, underscores’ fictional town odysseys, DJ Re:Code’s ADHD-core hyper-hyper-pop. But for the most part, “hyperpop” has seemed less like a coherent underground scene and more like a pandemic relic, a virtual graveyard of lost futures. Many of the 2020 scene leaders have fled elsewhere, putting zoomer twists on genres like frantic jungle and gently unfurling shoegaze. People have also started spraying the tag to describe practically anything amorphously fast and “cunty.” The Spotify playlist, which is one of the first things that appears when you type “hyperpop” on Google, began featuring people only tangentially related to the scene and complete randos from other genres.
As a nerd who grew up hooked on things like Pokémon and YouTube memes, something about the music felt personal. At a moment when the mainstream was dominated by ultra-slick pop machines and larger-than-life antiheroes, it was refreshing to find musicians who felt like they were the dorks and bookish friends I knew from class. It didn’t matter if their voices were lackluster or downright bad—online, they sounded like rockstars. The rise of digicore felt like an opportunity for a new kind of music stardom and sense of collectivity, where it didn’t matter how much swag you had in real-life or how many genres you blended into an inane smoothie. When the movement failed to crest, it was like being told what I suspected all along: This music is too weird and haphazard to get larger acclaim, the communal spirit isn’t viable in a dog-eat-dog industry where labels sandpaper their artists’ sound and prioritize signing palatable TikTok wunderkinds. Digital collectives still exist, but the online landscape feels much more atomized now, a constellation of artists dropping solo tapes; and anything remotely geeky-sounding gets immediately tagged as “music you can’t play for your friends.”
The radical potential of the scene has mostly evaporated, flattened and flayed into vague signifiers. You can see this most in an artist like Odetari, whose amorphously vapid style called “krushclub” sounds like a major label exec board e-mailed him a slideshow of Classic Hyperpop Ingredients: Auto-Tune croons plus cyborgian beats plus bitcrushed fuzz. Or something like Kim Petras and Sam Smith’s cheesily theatrical “Unholy.” It’s maybe the most popular “hyperpop” song ever, hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but it’s gratingly lurid. Charli XCX’s BRAT, a carousel of clubby abandon, could go down as the most mainstream “hyperpop” LP ever—Kamala Harris and Ella Emhoff probably talked about A. G. Cook’s metallic snares at the dinner table after Charli’s “kamala IS brat” post. But, as sleek as BRAT is, the production isn’t any more startling than Charli’s “Vroom Vroom” or “Secret” from almost a decade ago. Trawling through Spotify’s hyperpop playlist now reveals some catchy songs but also a heap of rote tropes: the campily Auto-Tuned vox, the distorted-to-death synths and bass, the convulsive EDM beats. “Hyperpop” has become a kind of musical font that anyone can deploy without adding much originality.
Nowadays, it feels like a lot of the most exciting “hyper” music is happening beyond the scene. I see it in the obscenely maximal beats that rappers like Carti protege Ken Carson, Osamason, and che use, twitching with volcanic bass. 2hollis, who was always adjacent to hyperpop, has a delectable fusion of hardstyle-ridden electroclash and shivering rap beats. There’s the strain of rhythmically ballistic electronic music known as “trashwave”—imagine a packed DAW puking up all of its layers and effect-chains during an ayahuasca session. These styles thrill individually yet lack the kind of collaborative exuberance that made hyperpop feel like a virtual neighborhood, a home team to follow and champion.
Maybe the biggest driver behind the scene’s dispersion is the fact that “hyperactivity” as a musical device has become banal and ran-through. The times we’re living in are already so speedmaxxed, digitized, relentlessly asphyxiated by stimuli. Every popular artist has a “sped-up” version of their music; presidential campaigns hurl shitposts and hype edits into the TikTok ether. Hyperpop was originally a countercultural aesthetic, a haven of forum geeks and nightcore freaks, built by and for the underground. When that abrasive style started to become watered-down, it makes sense that some would recoil or turn their attention to less zeitgeisty sounds. In 2024, hyperpop feels like the last new major genre: its dilution and adoption across the world (find hyperpop scenes in at least a dozen countries) shows how much people love it, even if it has barely ever ascended to mainstream glory. It’s helped people actualize things about themselves they never knew and spawned havens for marginalized oddballs. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had going out has been to hyperpop clubs, drunkenly swaying to Umru’s four-person B2B2B2B sets and yelling “FUCK THE PSAT!” with a crowd of sweaty teens at glaive’s first NYC show. Even if hyperpop is approaching peak sterility, we still have a bounty of memories and musical genius to look back on.
A Deeply Incomplete Canon of Hyperpop-Digicore (Beyond Ones Already Mentioned)
Dolly’s earliest and most exhilarating songs smack like the titles—a crumpled rush of words and confessions, the sound of uploading your brain to the cloud and drowning your worries in bass thuds.
An extract of 100% pure pop, an Ariana Grande arena soundtrack for Uncanny Valley Stadium, the national anthem of a yassified autocracy where the rain is pink and everyone’s Barbie.
Piss babies, shamefully small trucks, a beat so delectably deranged it’s like Skrillex producing for a Ringley Bros. clown carnival: This is 100 gecs at peak freak.
An all-star posse of quirked-up it-girls assembled to make hyperpop’s most addictive karaoke song.
A depression anthem so goddamn hard it makes 52 glum Mondays sound like the greatest thing ever, fuck Prozac.
ericdoa’s meta goodbye to his bitcrushed alter ego dante red nearly made me tear up. Switching between inflections, he raps against himself, interrogating why he’s selling out and going industry. He promises they’ll meet again someday. We’re still waiting for the moment.
Unlike the jittery newness of so much hyperpop, the Auto-Tune fever of “Perfect” feels beamed in from a frayed bootleg edition of Dance Dance Revolution circa 2004.
Digicore Avengers: Age of Auto-Tune.
True to its title, “Oasis” conjures up visions of a cybernetic treescape, with impossibly fresh vines and lapis-blue creeks sparkling in the sun. If there were a “7 Wonders of the SoundCloud Underworld,” this would qualify.
Maybe the most hyperdigital “digicore” of all time, a mad brainjection of surreal stutters, 8-bit twitches, and lyrics blending Mario, Pokemon, and Roblox with threats about gunning people down.
Click for angelus’ venomous trills and fortuneswan’s laser-shiny beat; stay for the goofy video of angelus’ bed.
A hyper-ballad so pretty it makes Rae’s exhausted sighs and earnest requests for better treatment sound joyous.
More heady than hyper, this sweet swoon of a tune from two scene O.G.s sounds like a bedtime lullaby for forest fairies.
The Welsh artist erupts into so many giddy stutters it’s like they’re roleplaying K.K. Slider from Animal Crossing.
This was the point in the scene when I thought, “Is it just becoming alt-rock?” Wait until the planet-shuddering final half-minute.
The way quannnic crests from sedate slowcore to 5,000-lumen-bulb drop feels like climbing over the top of a hill and seeing a horizon full of comets glinting in the night.
Floating eyes, paranoid spiraling, operatic wails: Tropes’ high-octane hate-letter is as electrifying as it is agitated.
Funny monkey, monkey GIF. Funny monkey, monkey GIF. Funny monkey, monkey GIF. Look at the monkey. It's a monkey. Look at the monkey, at the monkey.
Hyperpop at its most idyllic, the kind of tune that makes you want to drop whatever you’re doing and spin gleefully in your bedroom, helplessly fantasizing about everything possible in the world.
Dorian Electra pushes hyperpop to its most garish and grotesque extremes here, a gnarly blast of (un)happy hard-gore. Imagine a UFO of Hot Topic–wearing alien-punks descending to destroy Earth.
