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# What Hyperpop Is (or Was)
- URL: https://www.421.news/en/what-is-hyperpop/
- Published: 2026-11-09T11:07:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-09T11:28:14.000Z
- Description: Digital sonic experimentation or pure nostalgia? The queer scene and the myth of hyperpop as a musical genre.
- Author: Dante Sabatto
- Tags: culture, #en

A few months ago, the Spanish translation of *Hyperpop. El pop en tiempos de capitalismo digital* by Julie Ackermann came out. Until now, most of the discussion about what hyperpop is—that terminally online music genre—has played out in the blogosphere, across video essays, [Reddit ](https://www.421.news/en/everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-the-reddit-vs-wall-street-episode/)threads, and sprawling conversations on Discord servers and in private chats among fans and musicians. In that sense, Julie Ackermann's project is innovative: it sets out to think through the genre in book form, staking out both a personal and a theoretical position on it, not only in terms of its aesthetic and musical proposal but also in relation to its sociopolitical and cultural context—what her subtitle calls "digital capitalism."

Another similar case, though not yet translated into Spanish, is *The Future Is Not Lost*, a book in which Matt Bluemink reconstructs a blog debate he had with Em Colquhoun about [hauntology ](https://www.421.news/en/the-voice-of-the-dead-hauntology-divinity-and-disintegration/)and hyperpop. Just as Ackermann tries to sketch a political reading of hyperpop by tying it to late capitalism and authenticity, Bluemink reads SOPHIE's work as a reactivation of sonic futurism after the long night of retromania.

Both are optimistic readings: hyperpop supposedly arrives to redeem the contemporary scene and put an end to the pronounced pessimism of today's music criticism (read: [Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds](https://www.421.news/en/mark-fisher-simon-reynolds-music-en/)). Hyperpop, a sonic revolution well into the 21st century. And yet, where is that revolution? Let's back up a few steps: what is—or what was—hyperpop?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2b/7f/2b7f69fc-a243-4d2f-ae8e-db8312c6653a/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-78ff3e92-61d5-4890-8f18-c6cdfa0bb8e7.png)

## ↻ History

Hyperpop has an aesthetic dimension, as a music genre, and also a philosophical one. This gives rise to different explanations of what hyperpop was and, therefore, how it came about. There's a broad consensus about hyperpop's emergence and development. Its history breaks down into three moments: a proto-hyperpop scene in the early 2010s, a consolidation between 2018 and 2019, and a new stage in which the genre drifted and evolved into various branches and subgenres. Each of these moments, however, comes with slight nuances and is the subject of debate among hyperpop's fan-intellectuals.

> They're optimistic readings: hyperpop supposedly arrives to redeem the contemporary scene and put an end to the pronounced pessimism of today's music criticism.

When it comes to hyperpop's origins, interpretations vary depending on whether you look at its direct musical influences (the artists, works, and labels that helped shape the genre) or its more indirect sonic and aesthetic influences (tracing less obvious connections grounded in a more archaeological way of thinking about sound). Julie Ackermann, for example, anchors her timeline in 2013, with the formation of the art collective and independent label PC Music and, above all, with the figures of AG Cook and SOPHIE. Other relevant names belonging to the collective include Danny L Harle, Easyfun (Finn Keane), Hannah Diamond, GFOTY, umru, Namasenda, Hayden Dunham, and Planet 1999.

Indeed, the direct impact of the collective's sound, proposal, and vision on the formation of hyperpop—both as a genre and as a scene—is indisputable. Songs like AG Cook's "[Beautiful](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG0ggHM1PLM&ref=421.news)" (2013), the song-performance-ad "[Hey QT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MQUleX1PeA&ref=421.news)" (2014), and compilations like SOPHIE's [*PRODUCT*](https://nmbrs.bandcamp.com/album/product-2015?ref=421.news) (2015) are all textbook sources that, even though they've been cited to death, still convey the genre's vitality and the instant fascination it sparked in its audience. The proposal of this first wave of hyperpop centered on a clash between authenticity and artificiality in pop, especially in its technical-aesthetic dimension: a "digital" sound versus an "analog" one. PC Music's productions exalted the digital, using [synthesizers ](https://www.421.news/en/20000-leagues-vaporwave-en/)and sound engineering (which several of its members had studied) to craft pop songs that put the focus on the emotional power of the artificial. However (and without ever downplaying PC Music's direct impact on shaping the hyperpop project), other interpretations have detected the influence of other styles and scenes (from nightcore to [grime](https://xenogothic.com/2025/06/28/the-undeath-of-hyperpop-part-one-be-gay-make-grime/?ref=421.news)), ultimately seeking to explain the genre not only through its direct antecedents but also through a broader history of music.

A second debate revolves around the name itself. The term "hyperpop" didn't come from PC Music or the artists associated with its first stage but rather from employees of the Spotify corporation: in 2018 Glenn McDonald added it as a metadata category for certain artists and tracks, and in 2019 Lizzy Szabo put together the Hyperpop playlist, which included songs from 100 gecs' then-recent debut album, [*1000 gecs*](https://100gecs.bandcamp.com/album/1000-gecs?ref=421.news)—a band that has since been associated with the consolidation of the hyperpop sound in its most experimental form and with the emergence of a second stage. With the arrival of a name that unified these histories of styles, PC Music's project and philosophy, and the dialogues among various online music scenes came the typical problems that classification brings: what's in and what's out? Can a genre be built from "the top down" (Spotify)? What legitimacy and what limitations does that entail? Is it actually a "top-down" cultural construction? And above all, it brought the debate between experimentation and the mainstream, which led many artists to identify and disidentify with the term, often flip-flopping frequently.

Finally, there's a last stage, in the current decade, the 2020s. Here, following the   *gec* influence, their [Minecraft ](https://www.421.news/en/roblox-en/)concerts, and the genre's wider popularization during the pandemic with Charli xcx's album *how im feeling now* (2020), hyperpop's drift became less associated with an "artificially clean" sound like PC Music's projects and more with digital entropy, through microgenres like *glitchcore* or *digicore*. The [death of hyperpop](https://dantesabatto.digitalpress.blog/apocalipsis-hyperpop-o-el-fin-del-fin-del-fin/?ref=421.news) was also declared between 2023 and 2024, when a series of musical events converged that lead us, once again, to think about hyperpop through the lens of PC Music: *10*, PC Music's final album, in 2023, which announced the label's closure; and in 2024, Charli xcx's *BRAT* (a full-blown cultural phenomenon in its own right) and *SOPHIE*, the posthumous self-titled album by SOPHIE, who died tragically in an accident in January 2021\. Ackermann's book itself came out in 2024, a few months before *BRAT* dropped. Talking about a closing necessarily leads us to ask what was opened in the first place.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2b/7f/2b7f69fc-a243-4d2f-ae8e-db8312c6653a/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-d53f3586-502c-4d61-9e4f-733afd6a67a2.png)

## Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides

Let's start from the bottom. What do you need to produce music? Instruments and specific know-how. The digitization of sound has radically changed access to these means: just as, in the realm of *circulation*, streaming platforms let anyone listen to almost anything for little or no money, in the realm of *production* software developments let anyone produce almost any sound. The barriers to entry aren't zero: you still need a computer and some minimal training, but it's a lot easier to teach yourself FL Studio than the double bass. Hyperpop is an aesthetic response to this brutal shift in the conditions of production: we could call it a technification of aesthetics.

> Hyperpop is an aesthetic response to this brutal shift in the conditions of production: we could call it a technification of aesthetics.

But that shift alone wouldn't be enough to explain *what hyperpop sounds like*. A basic definition would call it digital maximalism: its core elements include brutal, [hypersynthesized](https://www.421.news/en/dungeon-synth-argentina-en/) distortion, lots of clipping, and abrupt cuts that sound like stuttering. It's a fragmented, ultra-contrasted sound, where 808s clash with high frequencies and vocals are drenched in autotune and pitch-shifting. It's turning the *glitch* into a system. It's an explicit search for an extreme, radical sound that nonetheless doesn't abandon certain pop conventions: the songs tend to be short and include a voice (even if it's an "alien" one), and *thematically* they can replicate the genre's tropes (love, sex, identity, fame, desire, and so on). It's a constant game between avant-garde and pop.

That dialectic comes paired with another one, which moves between the digital and the material, in the sense that the two are often thought of as opposites. Hyperpop songs often play at mimicking the sounds of latex, glass, bubbles, metal; a classic example is a moment in SOPHIE's "L.O.V.E." that sounds like a dentist's drill. Those sounds (literally of "materials") aren't made with samples; they're the flip side of *musique concrète*: there's no raw matter to play with, only the possibility of synthesizing that sound in a lab. We could say we're looking at a post-materialist version of a classic pop dialectic: the genuine versus the artificial. In her book, Ackermann draws a strict equivalence with *glam*, but that genre's logic is very specific (and very seventies): it involves the fictional construction of an image, inhabited like a character who doesn't sing a literal truth but, if anything, an emotional one. In hyperpop, by contrast, the difference between the genuine and the artificial has collapsed: "I'm real when I shop my face," SOPHIE sings on "Faceshopping." More than in the lyrics, the dialectic plays out in the production itself: by building "impossible" sounds, these end up sounding even more real than if they'd been sampled. 

It's impossible to talk about this aesthetic without considering gender—not genre in the musical sense, but gender in the bodily, sexual, identity sense. Hyperpop is an almost inherently queer zone, and it's no accident that many of its leading figures have been trans women. Perhaps there's a certain resemblance between a synthetic modulation of sound we might call *hyper* and the modulation of bodies, voices, and identities we'd call *queer.* 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2b/7f/2b7f69fc-a243-4d2f-ae8e-db8312c6653a/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-a7f489fd-790f-4615-b45d-2e3782665318-1.png)

## The Poverty of Hyperpoptimism

Julie Ackermann's book is just one more example of a kind of reading that tends to get made about hyperpop. This reading explores the genre's relationship to capitalism and, broadly speaking, its argument goes like this: hyperpop (in its ultraprocessed, technified, simultaneously sincere and [post-ironic](https://www.421.news/en/theory-meta-irony-post-irony-meme-sphere-en/) aesthetic) would be the enlightened genre of our era for understanding and critiquing capitalism "from within." Because of its exploration of pop desire and its experimentation with manufactured, artificial sounds, hyperpop supposedly possesses an "awareness" of the violent detachment that capitalism produces, and in that awareness lies a transformative power.

One of the main problems with this kind of hypothesis lies in its very interpretation of capitalism, which it treats as interchangeable with the notion of consumer culture, leaving no room whatsoever for social relations: capitalism is "streaming [platforms](https://www.421.news/en/e-commerce-algorithmic-pricing-mercado-libre-en/), social media, products in flashy packaging, Uber, and airplanes." The argument rarely goes deeper than this: capitalism is identified with the consumption of products and services, and we *want* to consume them, so any acknowledgment of that desire would mean we unconsciously desire capitalism; therefore, critical radicalism against the system consists solely in acknowledging this situation and exaggerating it. A radicalized existence within the system would be a *radical existence*. The resemblance to a certain vulgar [*accelerationism*](https://www.421.news/en/guide-acceleracionism-ideology-apocalipsis-en/) is obvious. 

This simplified hypothesis about capitalism leads to a simplified reading of hyperpop. By acknowledging a desire for artificiality, consumption, and the digital, hyperpop would be putting forward a way forward that preserves our consumer desires beyond the evils of capitalism. Through the desire/consumption relationship, reflected in its use of technified sound, and its ambiguous position between the mainstream and experimentation, hyperpop would represent a politically radical form of entryism, capable of "getting inside" the capitalist system insofar as it recognizes the ways in which capitalism shapes our desire. And that, in and of itself, would open up a space for critiquing it.

The result is a reading that ascribes to the emergence and program of hyperpop a political premeditation the genre didn't necessarily have. It pins on the PC Music artists and their hyperpop successors an individualized awareness of the (cultural) discontents of capitalism, in order to proclaim that their aesthetic proposal amounts to an intentional search for an alternative (anticapitalist) future. All of this ends up in an idealist interpretation that there was, and still is, a “revolutionary” power inherent to hyperpop.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2b/7f/2b7f69fc-a243-4d2f-ae8e-db8312c6653a/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-38f2de46-1a63-4108-98ef-c4c743a22b80.png)

## Hyper revolution or pure hype?

So we have Julie Ackermann's piece, which argues that Reynolds' and Fisher's readings of hauntology and retromania are “somewhat reactionary” because of their “pessimistic conclusions.” Hyperpop would be the *cure:* the recovery of the future in the form of [*optimism*](https://www.421.news/en/asimov-optimismo-ciencia-ficcion-humanidad-en/)*.* Matt Bluemink says something similar: SOPHIE's ability to build a “sound of the future” would represent the [*end of the end*](https://dantesabatto.digitalpress.blog/apocalipsis-hyperpop-o-el-fin-del-fin-del-fin/?ref=421.news), the refutation of the thesis that “it's easier to imagine the end of the world,” yadda yadda yadda.

Is that really so? Up to a point, the arguments hold water: it's true that listening to, say, “Drop FM” by AG Cook and Hannah Diamond in 2016, we felt that sensation Fisher considered lost—that of a sound that couldn't have existed before, music that would have been unrecognizable twenty years earlier. And yet a decade has gone by since those PC Music compilations. Today, even Camila Cabello's latest, godawful album is “hyperpop-inspired.” Hyperpop is no longer something that is, but something that *was*.

Maybe we need to stop asking pop music to start the [revolution ](https://www.421.news/en/alliance-with-machines-against-capital/)for us. As Em Colquhoun rightly points out in [her](https://xenogothic.com/2026/07/24/the-work-of-mourning-on-anti-hauntology-and-accelerationism-again/?ref=421.news) [brilliant](https://xenogothic.com/2025/06/28/the-undeath-of-hyperpop-part-one-be-gay-make-grime/?ref=421.news) [essays](https://xenogothic.com/2025/07/01/the-undeath-of-hyperpop-part-two-pop-as-noise/?ref=421.news), that's not what the writing on *hauntology* was arguing. Hauntology isn't just “looking at the past,” and hyperpop isn't just “looking to the future.” In fact, the term Bluemink coins while arguing with Colquhoun—“anti-hauntology”—is particularly symptomatic. Symptomatic because it shows that, after hauntology, you can't just “go back to the future” that easily: every attempt at rupture is, at least for now, in explicit dialogue with the debates about the cancellation of the future.

> Maybe we need to stop asking pop music to start the revolution for us.

Maybe people insist so much that hyperpop is accelerationist, cyberfeminist, ultra-queer because they're emphasizing the technification of the aesthetic (the technical manipulation of the conditions for producing sound) and losing sight of the other half: the aestheticization of the technical. In other words, against that (pseudo-)democratization of access to the means of production that digital offers, you have to set a democratization of the imagination. You can create anything, but what are you going to create? Hyperpop goes looking for the answer in pop, and that's why Bluemink links SOPHIE and Arca to Fisher's “popular modernism,” the mythical meeting of the avant-garde and mass culture. But pop isn't just mass culture; it's an aesthetic form especially captured by market mechanisms. The way out that hyperpop seeks is, in fact, [accelerationist](https://www.421.news/en/nick-land-the-apostle-of-chaos/): radicalizing the identification with those mechanisms instead of fighting them. The question is where that strategy leads: does Arca working with Kanye say more about Arca or about Kanye? 

A pessimistic reading—the kind those who *hype* hyperpop don't like—might point out that the genre's contemporary descendants ended up with neither the cake nor the eating of it: they abandoned sonic experimentation and never made it onto the radio. This year there are plenty of examples, excellent albums inspired by hyperpop or made by artists from the genre that are a less radical pop, though not a traditional one either: *U*, by Underscores; *WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA*, by Slayyyter; *HALO*, by Tiffany Day. But we could also say: the experiment went pretty far. Didn't the same thing happen to [punk](https://www.421.news/en/punk-good-bad-ugly-leone-clint-eastwood-en/), allowing for the enormous differences? An explosion that lasts two or three years before turning into something else, more assimilable but not necessarily less interesting. They even share a certain nihilism, but where punk was anhedonic, suicidal or anarchist, hyperpop is more psychedelic, tied to ego dissolution or the deterritorialization of desire.

What hyperpop makes possible, perhaps, is “taking pop seriously.” Until now, pop could be taken seriously as the expression of subaltern, queer or racialized groups (the rehabilitation of disco); in the form of virtuosity (synthpop, sophisti-pop); or flat out through the populist or demagogic discourses of *poptimism*. Hyperpop tries another path: no arguments needed, pop is already, in itself, serious business. Hyperpop puts pop in rock's place: it's not on the radio (where country, Latin music and R&B play), it's off making albums. 

There was a musical genre that actually broke barriers, that truly managed to once again create something “that sounded like nothing had ever sounded before.” Was the future born again? It's not that simple: the future is always being born and getting captured all over again by the forces of retromania. Hyperpop was an attempt, one more. Its shockwave will keep being felt for a long time, even if today it's already part of the sea.