In an interview with the music website Pitchfork this October, one half of 100 gecs, Dylan Brady, said that, if he had an intern, he would get them to catalogue ever song in the Billboard Hot 100 and categorise them by factors such as “instrument, key, tempo, BPM” as well as “pitch correction, speed of Auto-Tune” and outliers such as “songs that have no drums that reached number one”. They are, it turns out, canny pop manipulators. Songs tend to be short and snappy – many of them styled in lowercase – but manage to pack in a bewildering array of stylistic elements, everything from bubblegum pop and Eurohouse, to hip-hop, trance, J- and K-pop, emo and even nu-metal.

It’s a sound enthralled with taut, squeally synth melodies and Auto-Tuned earworm hooks, but also surrealism, nostalgia for the apparently bygone internet age of the Noughties, and distortion, lots of it. Hyperpop is a self-referential, humorous and excessive brand of pop music that is apparently everywhere at the moment and proliferating lightning-fast in the era of TikTok. But her query prompted many people to ask the same thing: what exactly is hyperpop? And how has it become the most hyped sound of 2020? XCX quickly followed her post with one adding, “I do not identify with music genres”. Earlier this summer, the British pop star Charli XCX put out a simple tweet: “what is hyperpop?” It’s a term that has been liberally thrown around to describe many a pop musician this year, from Rina Sawayama to Dorian Electra and even certain tracks by the rapper Rico Nasty.

Hyper pop