Hyperpop

What it is

A. G. Cook started PC Music in August 2013 and spent two years releasing records that sounded like adverts for products that did not exist. SOPHIE's Bipp came out the same year on Numbers and did the same trick with sound design instead of pastiche. Charli XCX's Pop 2 in 2017 put the approach next to actual pop songwriting, 100 gecs made 1000 gecs out of it in 2019, and later that year a Spotify playlist attached the word hyperpop to the whole area, which is how a scene of about forty people acquired a genre name none of them picked. The drums are the giveaway. They are pop drums, plain and loud, run through so much clipping that the transients square off, and then edited so a chorus can shatter halfway through and reassemble.

What it sounds like

Bright to the point of discomfort. Vocals pitched up four to seven semitones with the formants left wrong, so a singer sounds synthetic without sounding robotic. Leads are supersaws and FM bells with fast attacks. The percussive sound design comes out of SOPHIE's toolbox: latex snaps, balloon squeaks, springs, bubbles and metal, all with the transient exaggerated. Bass is either a rubbery square lead or a distorted 808 with no middle option. Everything is hard-clipped rather than compressed, so the mix has no dynamic range and enormous perceived energy, and quiet moments are made by muting rather than by turning down.

Key elements

• The clipped drum busKick and snare driven through a hard clipper until the peaks flatten. It makes the drums louder without making them bigger, which is the exact sound this genre is after.
• Vocals up a fifthPitch-shifted well past what a person can sing, with formant correction off. The uncanny quality is the aesthetic, and correcting it back to natural removes the reason anyone did it.
• A chorus that shattersBar one is a straight pop beat and bar two comes apart into stutters and rolls. The pattern here is written that way, so the two bars share a tempo and very little else.
• Metallic one-shotsSprings, snaps, glass and latex used as fills and accents. They sit at 127 next to hats at 30, and that contrast does the work a reverb would do elsewhere.
• No middle dynamicHits are either as loud as the track allows or nearly inaudible. Anything in between reads as an ordinary pop record, which is the failure mode.

How to get them

• Pitch the vocal wrong on purposeShift the lead vocal up five to seven semitones with formant preservation switched off, then double it an octave up at about minus 12dB. Tune the doubled take by hand so the two disagree slightly.
• Clip, do not limitPut a hard clipper on the drum bus and drive it 6 to 9dB in. A limiter pumps and ducks; a clipper squares the top off the transient and keeps the density, which is what makes these records sit still and stay loud.
• SnareLayer a tight acoustic snare, a clap and a metallic snap, all under 200 milliseconds, then pitch the stack up two semitones. It should sound closer to a pop-punk snare than to anything from a drum machine.
• Write bar two as an edit of bar oneBounce bar one, drop it back into the arrangement, and cut the copy into stutters and repeats. Programming the second bar from scratch never produces the same relationship between the two.
• Bell leadAn FM patch with a fast attack and a 200 millisecond decay, playing a major-key hook in octaves. Add a short bright plate at about 15 percent and high-pass the return at 1kHz.
• Mute for dynamicsCut everything except the vocal for two beats before a chorus rather than filtering down into it. With no dynamic range left in the mix, silence is the only contrast tool you have.

Reference points

A. G. Cook and PC Music, SOPHIE, Charli XCX, 100 gecs, Danny L Harle, Hannah Diamond, Dorian Electra and Umru. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.