Hyperpop was a playlist, not a scene. The records outlived the word.

On RateYourMusic, a genre descriptor has to survive an argument. Somebody proposes it, other people vote, and the tag either sticks to a release or gets stripped off by users who think it is wrong. It is slow, pedantic, occasionally unhinged, and it produces a vocabulary that most listeners actually agree with.

Hyperpop did not go through any of that. It arrived, fully formed, from an editor's desk at a streaming company.

The tag came with a playlist

In August 2019 Spotify launched a playlist called Hyperpop with 100 gecs on the cover art. The senior editor behind it, Lizzy Szabo, had been trying to place songs from 1000 gecs on existing playlists and finding that none of them fit. The word itself surfaced in the platform's own microgenre metadata, the sprawling taxonomy project that gave the world thousands of machine-derived genre names nobody had asked for.

That is a strange origin story for a genre, and it is worth sitting with. Punk got its name from fanzines. House got its name from a club. Hyperpop got its name from a playlist editor solving a shelving problem, and within eighteen months it was the most-used music word on the internet.

The playlist worked because the music was genuinely hard to file. Laura Les and Dylan Brady built 1000 gecs out of ska horns, nightcore vocals, dubstep drops and emo lyrics, and they compressed all of it until it sounded like a phone speaker giving up. The record had no obvious lineage in any single scene. It had a lineage in about nine.

What the word was pointing at

Underneath the tag sat two things that had almost nothing to do with each other.

The first was PC Music, the London label A. G. Cook started in 2013, which treated pop's most disposable surfaces as raw material: sped-up vocals, ringtone melodies, the specific gloss of an advertisement. It was an art project with a sense of humour about being one, and it produced a genuine body of work.

The second was SOPHIE, who is the reason any of this is remembered as music rather than as a joke about music. Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides (2018) took the same plastic timbres and made them sound like weather. Nothing on it is ironic. SOPHIE died in Athens in January 2021, at 34, and the void she left is still the largest thing in this conversation.

Then there was everyone else the playlist swept up: teenagers on SoundCloud making rage beats and glitchcore in their bedrooms, mostly American, mostly with no connection to London art pop beyond a shared taste for distortion. Calling those two groups one genre was always a filing decision, not a musical claim. Our guide to hyperpop's second wave tries to untangle the digicore half of it.

The word became a liability

By 2021 hyperpop meant "loud and pitched up," which is to say it meant nothing. Labels started using it in press releases for artists who had never heard a PC Music record. Playlist placement became the point. Every musician actually inside the thing spent interviews explaining that they did not consider themselves part of it, which is what happens when a category gets applied to you rather than claimed by you.

Cook closed the loop himself. In June 2023, PC Music announced that the year would be its last for new releases, with the label continuing only as an archive and a reissue operation. Ten years, then the shutters. Cook put out Britpop in May 2024 on a different imprint entirely.

Meanwhile the ideas walked out the front door and into the charts. Charli XCX had been working with SOPHIE since Vroom Vroom in 2016 and with Cook since Number 1 Angel, and by 2024 she had made the most successful record any of that lineage produced.

Brat is a pop album by an established pop star, and its production vocabulary is straight out of a scene that had just declared itself finished. That is usually how these things end. The scene dissolves, the techniques get absorbed, and a few people get very rich while the originators get a footnote.

Except the artists are having their best year

Here is the part that breaks the usual story. The musicians the tag was stuck to did not fade with it.

Jane Remover has released three studio albums and spent each one somewhere else. Frailty (2021) was digicore. Census Designated (2023) was a shoegaze record with the guitars turned into weather systems, and it is the reason they keep showing up in conversations about the new shoegaze. Revengeseekerz (April 2025, with a Danny Brown verse on it) went back to the noise. They then put out a whole other album, Status Update Music, in May 2026 under the Leroy alias. Nobody who moves that fast is a genre.

underscores, meanwhile, made the best-reviewed record of this entire lineage. U came out in March 2026 on Mom + Pop and Corporate Rockmusic, nine tracks, thirty-four minutes, and Pitchfork gave it Best New Album at 8.6. Devon Karpf described it as music for malls, airports, hotels and supermarkets, which is both a joke about ambient functionality and an accurate description of how the album sounds: frictionless on the surface, deeply unsettled a layer down. Wallsocket (2023) told stories about a fictional Michigan town. U is what happens when the same writer stops needing the fiction.

And Ninajirachi's I Love My Computer (August 2025) is the one to put in front of anyone who thinks this music is only for people who grew up on Discord. It is club music made by someone who learned production from the internet and never pretended otherwise, and it earned a 7.8 from Pitchfork without softening a single edge.

So what was hyperpop

A distribution accident that turned out to be a useful pointer for about three years. It got a lot of listeners to a lot of records they would otherwise never have found, which is more than most genre names manage. It also flattened a set of very different projects into one bucket and then made that bucket a marketing category, which is what killed it.

The music was never the problem. Strip the word off and you have SOPHIE, Cook's decade of releases, a generation of bedroom producers who learned to arrange in a browser, and now a run of 2025 and 2026 albums that are better than anything the tag covered at its peak. Genres are just how we point at things. This one got pointed at from a boardroom instead of a basement, and the records survived it anyway.

Rate the six above and tell me where you land. Was hyperpop ever a real genre, or was it always a playlist with good taste? The comments are open and I expect to be told I am wrong about Brat.