Hyperpop

Hyperpop is an electronic music movement and loosely defined subgenre that originated in the early 2010s in the United Kingdom. It is characterised by an exaggerated or maximalist take on 21st century popular music tropes and typically integrates pop and avant-garde sensibilities while drawing on elements commonly found in electronic, rock, hip-hop, and dance music. The origins of hyperpop are primarily traced back to the output of English musician A. G. Cook's record label and art collective PC Music, with associated artists Sophie, GFOTY, Hayden Dunham, Hannah Diamond, and Charli XCX, helping to pioneer a musical style that was later known as "bubblegum bass". In 2019, the genre experienced a rise in popularity with the virality of the song "Money Machine" by 100 Gecs, and was further proliferated by Spotify, whose employee Lizzy Szabo launched the influential "Hyperpop" playlist, after spotting the term "hyperpop" on the platform's metadata, which had previously been added by data analyst Glenn McDonald in 2018. Following this, the style gained wider popularity among Gen Z through social media platforms like TikTok, particularly on Alt TikTok, which boosted its exposure during the COVID-19 lockdowns. At the time, several contemporaneous styles such as digicore, glitchcore, and robloxcore were synonymous with the genre, while dariacore, hyperplugg and hyperfunk were associated with the movement by the press. After hyperpop entered the mainstream in the early 2020s, the label was rejected by artists originally associated with the scene, which led to an overall decline in emerging musicians. Hyperpop's influence was endured in the development of online microgenres such as sigilkore, jerk, rage, hexD, and krushclub, alongside the rise of indie sleaze and the recession pop revival.