The History of Hyperpop

Every music scene has a moment when a scattered handful of oddballs suddenly gets a name, and the internet decides they were a movement all along. That is more or less how hyperpop happened — a story that runs from bedroom producers and sped-up anime edits to a Spotify playlist and, eventually, the actual charts.

Before It Had a Name

Long before anyone was using the word, the raw materials were already circulating online. Nightcore — sped-up, pitch-raised pop and dance tracks, often paired with anime imagery — normalised high-pitched vocals and breakneck tempos for a generation of internet listeners. Meanwhile, cheap software and direct online distribution let bedroom producers develop wildly individual production styles without needing a label or a scene behind them. Add in early-2000s internet aesthetics — ringtone-era synths, Flash animation, gaming sounds — and you have the vocabulary this whole story would eventually borrow from.

2013: A London Label Called PC Music

The clearest institutional starting point for hyperpop is PC Music, founded in London by A. G. Cook in 2013. Its early releases — including GFOTY's “Bobby” — treated pop conventions as material to be exaggerated rather than smoothed over: implausibly bright synths, conspicuously artificial vocal tones and abrupt digital edits, all wrapped around melodies simple enough to hum. Hannah Diamond and Danny L Harle were among the other early artists building that same synthetic, gloss-coated pop world alongside Cook — the world that would later be filed under hyperpop.

SOPHIE's Radical Sound Design

Running in close parallel was the producer SOPHIE, whose metallic percussion, elastic basses and synthetic vocal textures pushed the same instincts even further into genuinely radical territory. Widely regarded as one of hyperpop's most important predecessors, SOPHIE's work made the case that pop's artificial surfaces could be an artistic statement in themselves, not something to disguise.

2019: A Name, a Playlist and a Breakout

The word “hyperpop” itself only became widely recognisable once Spotify launched an editorial playlist under that exact title in August 2019, curated in part by editor Lizzy Szabo. What the playlist did was give a shared, searchable label to artists who had been circulating through adjacent scenes — PC Music, bubblegum bass, SoundCloud rap, nightcore — without one unifying name. That same year, the duo 100 gecs released their album 1000 gecs, a gleefully chaotic collision of pop, dubstep, ska, screamo and hip-hop that became hyperpop's defining crossover text, eventually reaching audiences well beyond the playlist's original niche via Atlantic Records.

Crossing Into the Mainstream

From there, the aesthetic's fingerprints started turning up further from the underground. Charli XCX is frequently cited as the clearest bridge into chart-facing pop, carrying PC Music-associated production techniques — audible Auto-Tune, bright synthetic textures, maximalist arrangement — into a much bigger commercial arena. Dorian Electra's theatrical, gender-playful take on hyperpop also helped broaden what the aesthetic could look and feel like beyond its earliest, most internet-native corners.

The Next Wave

As the original moment passed, a younger generation of artists — among them glaive, ericdoa, underscores and brakence — carried a related, emo- and SoundCloud-influenced sound forward, often discussed under the newer label “digicore.” More recently, artists like Jane Remover and 2hollis have been folded into coverage of the style's ongoing evolution, even as their own music increasingly spans well beyond any one tag.

A Family Tree, Not a Straight Line

It is worth remembering that none of this unfolded as a tidy sequence of cause and effect. Nightcore edits, PC Music releases, SOPHIE's production work and early SoundCloud experiments were all happening in overlapping timeframes, developed by people who mostly did not know each other, let alone agree they were building the same thing. The word “hyperpop” arrived afterwards, retroactively, to describe a pattern that had already been forming for the better part of a decade.

So Was There Ever One True Version?

Not really, and that is arguably the most honest way to sum up this whole history. It can mean the tight 2019–2021 wave tied to that Spotify playlist, or a broader, still-evolving production style built on exaggeration and digital excess, or — more cynically — a platform-generated umbrella term that helped streaming services file away music that never fit tidy categories in the first place. All three are defensible, and the disagreement is really a story about how internet-native music gets named at all.

Carry On Exploring

If you want the full artist roll call, our guide to the best hyperpop artists to know picks up from every name mentioned here. For the records that actually matter, see essential hyperpop albums explained, and if you are brand new to all of this, our beginner's guide is the better starting point than any timeline.

The Bottom Line

From nightcore edits and a London label's art-school pop experiments to a Spotify playlist and a genuine chart presence, hyperpop's history was written almost entirely online — built by people who were never in the same room, tied together after the fact by a name none of them chose for themselves.

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