Hyperpop is a loosely-defined music movement and microgenre that originated in the UK during the early 2010s. It is characterized by a maximalist or exaggerated take on popular music ,and artists within the genre typically integrate pop and avant garde sensibilities while drawing on themes commonly found in electronic , hip pop, and dance music.
Deriving influence from a varied range of sources, the origins of the hyperpop scene are most commonly traced to the output of English musician A. G. Cook’s collective PC Music and its associated artists like Sophie and Charli XcX. Music associated with this scene received wider attention in August 2019 when Spotify used the term “hyperpop” as the name of a playlist featuring artists such as Cook and 100 Gecs. The genre spread within younger audiences through social media platforms, especially TikTok.
The movement is often linked to LGBTQ+ online communities, and many key figures identify as transgender , non-binary , or gay. “Digicore” is a contemporaneous movement that is sometimes conflated with “hyperpop” due to its overlapping artists.
In August 2019, Spotify launched the “Hyperpop” playlist which further cemented the genre, and featured guest curation from 100 Gecs and others. Other artists featured on the playlist included Cook, Slayyyter, Gupi, Caroline Polachek, Hannah Diamond, Donatachi, ThatKid and Kim Petras. Spotify editor Lizzy Szabo and her colleagues landed on the name for their August 2019 playlist after McDonald noted the term in the website’s metadata and classified it as a microgenre. In November, Cook added artists such as J Dilla and Kate Bush to the playlist, which added confusion to the genre’s scope.
The genre began to see rise in popularity in 2020, with the prominence of the Spotify playlist and its spread within younger audiences on social media, such as on TikTok. Hyperpop albums like Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now (2020) and A. G. Cook’s Apple (2020) appeared on critic’s 2020 end-of-year lists. Internationally, hyperpop gained notoriety in Australia, China and as Argentina and Spain, with Spanish speaking artists and producers delving into the microgenre.
In mid-late 2020, the social media platform TikTok saw a rise in the popularity of hyperpop songs, mainly being used on the ‘Alt’ side of TikTok, also called ‘Alt TikTok ‘.As of March 2022, videos with the hashtag “hyperpop” have accumulated nearly 400 million views on TikTok. Part of the reason the genre is rising in popularity across the platform can be contributed to the platform’s nature of favoring heavy beats that creators can dance to and make transitions. Creators have used hyperpop sounds in their videos to only further the genre’s rise across the platform in reaching millions of users.
While the first wave of hyperpop was a satire and homage to the genre of pop music, the second wave was a replication and homage to the artists included on Spotify’s hyperpop playlist, which divided the community. In particular, Charli XCX announced the death of the genre on Instagram.
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