All About Hyperpop

Public Opinion
May 30, 2024

A Note from Jack

I spend a lot of time thinking about genres. They can probably be best defined as a system for organizing or categorizing music. If you ask someone what type of music they listen to, the answer more often than not will be a genre or list of genres. The big ones have entire radio stations dedicated to them: country, pop, hip-hop/rap, rock and roll. Others are harder to define; we’ve talked about indie in previous newsletters. I was actually thinking of starting a series about genres when the New York Times asked us to make a video about Hyperpop, which, if you’re unfamiliar, is a genre… sort of.

If you don’t know about Hyperpop, The Times does a great job breaking it down in this article. You’ve also definitely heard hyperpop songs if you’ve seen a lot of Track Star episodes. I play a decent amount of it. In our video we asked a bunch of New Yorkers what they knew about the genre, and one of those New Yorkers happened to be our friend Quinn Moreland who you know from this newsletter. Quinn was our resident expert in the video, and she has a wonderful piece down below about hyperpop pioneer SOPHIE. Also, we just dropped another episode of Track Star Presents with Kacy Hill AND launched the Presents accounts on TikTok and Instagram. What a week!

– Jack

SOPHIE Saw the Future

By Quinn Moreland

On January 30, 2021, the 34 year old avant-pop producer SOPHIE died after an accident in Athens. “True to her spirituality she had climbed up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell,” her family wrote in a statement. The circumstances were tragically poetic and, painfully, were of a piece with SOPHIE’s music: she was always reaching towards the sublime.

Since her death, SOPHIE’s transformative effect on modern pop music has become more pronounced. She could be considered one of the godmothers of hyperpop, the umbrella term for a sub-genre of artists united by their use of maximalist, blown-out production styles and, often, irreverence. “It’s impossible to overstate the influence SOPHIE had on me and countless others, musically and otherwise,” Laura Les of the hyperpop act 100 gecs wrote in tribute. “We’re still going to be catching up to [Sophie] for years to come.”

One artist determined to give SOPHIE her flowers is her frequent collaborator, Charli XCX (seen on Track Star here). “You had a power like a lightning strike,” she sings of her late friend on “So I,” a track off her upcoming record BRAT. Charli and SOPHIE began working together in the early days of PC Music, the London experimental label led by A.G. Cook. Back then, Charli was pop music’s enfant terrible, and SOPHIE arrived bearing a thrilling vision of the future. Early SOPHIE singles like “Lemonade” and “Bipp” drew influence from dubstep, electro, and house music, but sounded uniquely singular, uniquely SOPHIE. Her early work was strange and bouncy, built around pitched-up vocals and hyperkinetic production. There was an element of instant-gratification, a cheeky immediacy that winked at pop’s consumerist nature.

All of this made SOPHIE an ideal producer for Charli XCX. The pair first collaborated on Charli’s 2016 Vroom Vroom EP, a project that sounds like chromatic bubblegum, and continued to collaborate on songs like “After the Afterparty” and on the mixtapes Number 1 Angel and Pop 2. Meanwhile, SOPHIE became an in-demand producer, working with artists including Vince Staples, Let’s Eat Grandma, and Madonna (that would be the single “Bitch I’m Madonna,” which she co-produced alongside Diplo.)

All the while, little was known about SOPHIE’s identity. She refrained from releasing traditional press images, offered zip in the way of biography, and once sent a friend to stand-in as “SOPHIE” for her Boiler Room set (meanwhile, the real SOPHIE was performing the part of security guard). In late 2017, SOPHIE stepped out of the shadows with her first solo music in two years, a ballad called “It’s Okay to Cry.” The song’s self-directed video marked the first time that SOPHIE intentionally appeared on camera and announced that she was a transgender woman.

The following year, SOPHIE released her only studio album, the Grammy-nominated Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. Songs like “Is It Cold in the Water” and “Immaterial” paired industrial electronics and lush minimalism, with lyrics touching on themes of identity, longing, and artifice. SOPHIE stayed busy, releasing Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides Non-Stop Remix Album and working with artists including the UK rapper Shygirl and the footwork producer Jlin.

There was a full-circle moment in her final years that offers comfort in retrospect. Back in 2015, SOPHIE declared that she had no interest in remixes of her work “unless it’s Autechre.” In 2020, the pioneering electronic duo sent over their version of “Bipp” with a note, “Sorry this is so late. Hope it’s still of some use.” Days before her death, SOPHIE shared “Unisil,” a lost track off her 2015 EP PRODUCT. The song’s eerie rumbling affirms that even in her music’s earliest incarnations, SOPHIE always sounded like the future.