Guides/A Riffiter guide
Hyperpop's second wave: digicore and what came after
After 100 gecs broke the dam: the SoundCloud kids who rebuilt pop in their bedrooms.
Hyperpop's first wave (SOPHIE, PC Music, 100 gecs) peaked around 2019-2020. What followed was richer: digicore, the SoundCloud- and Discord-born scene of teenage producers, and its offshoots. This guide maps the second wave through nine key artists and records, from Jane Remover's Frailty (2021) onward.
When the "hyperpop" playlist era peaked, the interesting music was already happening somewhere else: on SoundCloud and in Discord servers, where teenagers were splicing emo, rage beats and shoegaze into songs recorded on school laptops. The scene called itself digicore, then immediately started arguing about the name, always a sign something real is happening.
This is the second wave and its aftershocks: messier, sadder and more inventive than the genre that spawned it.
- 1
Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides
★ 3.8 · 5The ancestor: SOPHIE's only studio album (2018) stretched pop between latex textures and orchestral ambient, and made the whole movement thinkable. Every artist below is working in the space she opened.
- 2
- 3
how i'm feeling now
★ 3.5 · 8The mainstream bridge: recorded in five weeks of 2020 lockdown with fan input over Zoom, how i'm feeling now brought the scene's collaborative, extremely-online process into pop's front room, and legitimized everything around it.
- 4
Frailty
★ 4.0 · 1The second wave's masterpiece: Frailty (2021) fused digicore's glitch with shoegaze scale and adolescent ache. Originally released under the name dltzk, it's the record that made critics take the Discord generation seriously.
- 5
fishmonger
★ 2.5 · 1April Harper Grey's fishmonger (2021) runs pop-punk songwriting through hyperpop production into something stadium-sized and homemade at once. The scene's best pure songwriter, and its most likely crossover.
- 6
ericdoa
Hyperpop
★ 4.0 · 1Connecticut's ericdoa was digicore's first face, melodic, rapid-fire songs that carried the scene from SoundCloud to major-label deals and festival stages. Start with COA (2020) and things with wings (2021).
- 7
glaive
Hyperpop
★ 4.1 · 7Ash Gutierrez recorded his early EPs as a North Carolina teenager mid-pandemic; cypress grove (2020) and all dogs go to heaven (2021) made him the scene's prodigy. His later albums steer toward live-band pop, the second wave growing up in public.
- 8
Dariacore by Leroy (2021)
Jane Remover's alias Leroy invented a whole microgenre with one album: dariacore, plunderphonics mashing chart pop vocals into jersey-club chaos, named for a Daria screenshot. Three volumes later it has imitators worldwide and a strong claim as the most influential idea of the wave.
- 9
2hollis
Electropop
★ 3.8 · 6The newest branch: 2hollis runs rage beats and EBM pressure through pop instincts, and his 2024-25 ascent (opening arena tours while barely out of his teens) marks where the post-hyperpop lineage meets the mainstream next.
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