underscores — Wallsocket (2023)
Apil Harper Grey, the songwriter and producer who performs as underscores, commented offhandedly in a 2023 interview that hyperpop was “officially dead.” “A lot of us in the community are trying to figure out where we go next — there’s some folktronica, some rap… it seems like everyone is just chasing what feels exciting… I want everything to feel like hyperpop, even if it doesn’t sound like it.”
There aren’t that many artists out there right now who people would unambiguously describe as making “hyperpop” anymore, but its influence is everywhere. Hyperpop says: no matter what kind of musician you are, you have more options than you think you do. More than its sonic signatures (pitched-up vocals, distortion on everything, the revenge of 2010s brostep), what defined the genre was the way it held a funhouse mirror up to sonic culture. Everything was suddenly a caricature of itself. The abrupt juxtapositions on an album like 1000 gecs — between glittery trance and rock guitars, between soundboard effects and Skrillexesque power tool noises — didn’t feel forced. This is how sound travels online: the naturalized clichés of the codified genres, none of which are producing significant innovations at this point, can be put in air-quotes just by being placed next to each other. Dubstep, pop-punk, video game soundtracks, noise music, whatever Drain Gang is, VST presets, MP3 compression artifacts, nightcore, noise music, “noise music,” ridiculous sound effects ripped from old video games — these are ideas, signifiers, and brands just as much as they are sounds, flattened by the inexorable essentializing force of the internet. This isn’t clear until you put them next to each other, like readymades.
Like Dada, this kind of approach is basically negative — it functions like a critique. If every idea that a hyperpop track quotes or invokes is intended to be received as an already-reified quote, the surprise gets drained from the music after the joke has been told once or twice. (The third 100 gecs album feels like the joke wearing thin.) What Grey identified was the younger hyperpop artists, having mastered pastiche and irony, looking for a way out.
Grey’s way out was to make a rock album, Wallsocket, in which the same irreverent and genre-agnostic approach applies, but in a much more careful and considered way. The opening track, “Cops and Robbers,” is interspersed with vocal chops and a dizzy reverse-tape slowdown effect that lurches into the chorus. There’s a snare drum on the track “Old Money Bitch” that wouldn’t be out of place in a SOPHIE track. Two slow songs in the middle, “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am” and “Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” have a steady undercurrent of spoken vocal samples that add a sarcastic dimension to the songs, which would otherwise sound just as good totally stripped back. These elements don’t feel like they were dropped in from a foreign place — they feel like they’ve been carefully considered and placed right where they need to be to highlight the depth and complexity of Grey’s songwriting.
Hyperpop itself got commodified really quickly, and it’s sort of a punchline now. But I think as the genre matures — Wallsocket is a good example of the direction things are going — we’ll start to see it as something that led music in a lot of different directions, and essentially expanded what’s possible.
Anna Dorn — Exalted (2022)
Here’s another term that you used to hear a lot more of around 2021 — the “internet novel.” Remember those? There was the one about the Brooklyn woman whose boyfriend was secretly running an Instagram full of conspiracy theories. There was the one about the dysfunctional couple who become sexually fixated on an Instagram microcelebrity. There was the one about the woman whose relationship to Twitter transforms when her sister’s kid ends up in the NICU. There was the one about the Instagram influencer who helps start a sort of masculinity cult.
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