Hyperpop Artists

From A. G. Cook’s early-2010s work with the UK label and art collective PC Music, hyperpop took the familiar language of 21st-century pop and turned its scale up: hooks, electronic production and commercial forms became deliberately excessive, compressed and unstable rather than smoothly streamlined. It treats pop less as a fixed format than as material that can be stretched, warped and reassembled.

The sound draws freely from electronic music, dance, hip-hop, rock and pop, but it doesn’t settle neatly into any one of them. Hyperpop can retain a pop song’s directness while bringing in avant-garde ideas and abrupt shifts in texture or intensity. Its maximal approach separates it from conventional electropop, while its attachment to melody and pop construction distinguishes it from more purely experimental electronic music. The result is music that can feel bright, synthetic and immediate, yet deliberately overdriven in its arrangement and detail.

PC Music provided a central early context for the style, alongside artists including SOPHIE and Charli XCX. Work associated with that circle helped develop a related sound later known as bubblegum bass, which is closely tied to hyperpop’s early identity. By the late 2010s, 100 gecs brought a wider audience to the approach with “Money Machine,” while online communities connected hyperpop with overlapping styles such as digicore, glitchcore and robloxcore. Those adjacent labels point to its broad, internet-native range, but hyperpop remains most useful as a description for pop music made more extreme in form, production and genre collision.