What is hyperpop? The genre, its origins and its sound
Updated · onyr1x
Hyperpop is an internet-born style of pop music that pushes pop's features to extremes: pitch-shifted and heavily Auto-Tuned vocals, loud compression and distortion, bright synths and sudden genre switches inside one song. Its sound grew out of the London label PC Music and producers such as A. G. Cook and SOPHIE in the 2010s, and the name spread after Spotify launched its Hyperpop playlist in August 2019.
Where hyperpop came from
The groundwork was laid in London, where A. G. Cook founded the label and art collective PC Music in 2013. Artists around the label, including Cook, SOPHIE and Hannah Diamond, made a glossy, exaggerated version of pop that critics at first called bubblegum bass. It treated commercial pop sounds as raw material: cartoonishly high voices, plastic-sounding synths and hooks pushed past the point of comfort.
Charli XCX brought that sound closer to the mainstream. Her 2016 EP Vroom Vroom was made with SOPHIE, and her 2017 mixtape Pop 2, executive produced by A. G. Cook, is often cited as a template for the genre. Around the same time a younger wave of artists was making similar music online, often at home and often sharing it first on SoundCloud.
The word itself is older than the genre. The writer Don Shewey used "hyperpop" in 1988 to describe the Cocteau Twins. The modern meaning took hold when Spotify data analyst Glenn McDonald added it to the platform's genre metadata in 2018, and in August 2019 Spotify editor Lizzy Szabo launched the Hyperpop playlist. The playlist was prompted in part by the rise of 100 gecs, the duo of Laura Les and Dylan Brady, whose 2019 album 1000 gecs and song "Money Machine" became defining records of the style.
What hyperpop sounds like
There is no single hyperpop formula, and that is part of the point. Still, most tracks filed under the name share a set of habits that make the style easy to recognise.
- Vocals processed until they sound synthetic: pitched up, hard-tuned, doubled or chopped.
- Heavy compression, clipping and distortion, used on purpose so the track feels loud and slightly broken.
- Bright, metallic synths and percussion instead of warm, natural sounds.
- Abrupt switches between styles, for example from a pop chorus into a trance drop, a trap beat or a burst of guitar noise.
- Short song lengths and hooks that arrive quickly.
- Influences that include bubblegum pop, nightcore, trance, emo, nu-metal, trap and chiptune.
Hyperpop vs pop, PC Music and digicore
Hyperpop uses the building blocks of mainstream pop, such as catchy melodies, big choruses and polished production, but exaggerates them. Where a radio pop song hides its processing, hyperpop puts it in the foreground.
PC Music is a label and a scene; hyperpop is a much broader listening category that grew partly out of it. Digicore is a related term that online musicians began using around 2019 to describe their own scene, which leans more on emo, trap and rap and is built around online collaboration. Many artists appear in both conversations, and the lines between these labels are loose.
Is hyperpop still a thing?
By 2021 several artists associated with the genre, including glaive and ericdoa, were publicly distancing themselves from the label, which had become a catch-all for almost any unusual internet pop. The name is used less as a scene badge now, but the sound spread widely.
Its influence is easy to hear in mainstream pop. Charli XCX's 2024 album Brat, with A. G. Cook among its producers, was described by critics as a dance and electropop record that incorporates hyperpop, and it reached number one in the UK. Today many producers use hyperpop techniques inside other styles, from electropop and art-pop to K-pop-leaning and cinematic music.
How producers make hyperpop
Most hyperpop is made in a standard digital audio workstation with software instruments and plugins. The techniques are ordinary studio tools used at extreme settings.
- Pitch correction set to its fastest response so the voice snaps between notes, then pitch-shifted up or down for character.
- Layered, detuned synth leads and wide pads for the bright, oversized sound.
- Distortion, saturation and bit-crushing on drums, bass and even vocals.
- Aggressive bus compression and limiting to make the whole mix feel dense and loud.
- Arrangement edits such as stutters, reversed sections, tape-stop effects and sudden drops to silence.
Where to start listening
If you are new to the genre, these releases give a good picture of how it developed, from its PC Music roots to its crossover into the charts.
- SOPHIE, Product (2015) and Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides (2018)
- Charli XCX, Vroom Vroom (2016) and Pop 2 (2017)
- 100 gecs, 1000 gecs (2019)
- Charli XCX, how i'm feeling now (2020)
- Spotify's Hyperpop playlist, for current releases
How onyr1x works with hyperpop
onyr1x is a music producer based in Almada, across the river from Lisbon. He makes cinematic hyperpop and art-pop, K-pop-leaning production and music for game universes. You can hear the sound in the four tracks he released on SoundCloud in May 2026: LOST_SIGNAL, SAY_LESS, QUEEN_CODED and HOLD_ME.
If you are an artist who wants this kind of production built around your voice, or a half-finished hyperpop song taken the rest of the way, he offers custom production, mixing and mastering, studio sessions in Almada and remote work. He replies to enquiries personally and quotes each project on request.