What is hyperpop? Hyperpop is a maximalist, deliberately over-the-top style of pop music built on pitched-up vocals, heavily distorted bass and 808s, and bright, candy-coloured synths pushed to cartoonish extremes. It grew out of the UK label PC Music in the mid-2010s and broke into the mainstream around 2019–2020 through artists like 100 gecs, Charli XCX and SOPHIE. If you have heard a track that sounds like a pop song run through a sugar rush and a glitch at the same time, you have already heard hyperpop.
This guide covers where hyperpop actually came from, the ingredients that give it that plastic, hyper-real sound, the artists who defined it, and the surprisingly simple pop theory hiding underneath all the chaos. No hype, just the real story and the sounds that make the genre tick.
What is hyperpop, exactly, and where did it come from?
Hyperpop is best understood as pop with every dial turned past its normal limit. Where a mainstream pop song aims for polish and restraint, hyperpop chases excess: brighter, louder, faster, sweeter, and more distorted, often all at once. The genre exaggerates the shiny, artificial parts of pop on purpose, turning gloss into a statement rather than hiding it.
The roots trace back to PC Music, a London label and collective founded by producer A. G. Cook in 2013. Early PC Music acts — Cook himself, Hannah Diamond, GFOTY and Danny L Harle — made a hyper-glossy, plastic take on bubblegum pop that split listeners between “brilliant” and “unlistenable.” Around the same time, the Scottish producer SOPHIE was building a parallel sound out of squeaky, latex-like synths and enormous, physical bass on tracks such as “Bipp” (2013) and “Lemonade.” Together, PC Music and SOPHIE laid down the template that everything since has built on.
The word “hyperpop” itself came into wide use later. In August 2019, Spotify launched an editorial playlist simply called Hyperpop, which pulled these scattered internet sounds under one banner and gave a loose scene a name. From there the label stuck, even though many of the artists filed under it had been making the music for years before anyone called it that.
The signature sounds that make a track hyperpop
Hyperpop is defined by texture and attitude more than by any single chord trick. A handful of ingredients show up again and again:
- Pitched-up vocals: voices shifted high and drenched in Auto-Tune, so the singer sounds almost like a cartoon or a sped-up sample. This is one of the most instantly recognisable traits.
- Distorted, oversized bass and 808s: low end pushed until it clips, growls and rattles, borrowing the physical weight of trap and the abrasiveness of noise music.
- Bright, plastic synths: glassy bells, supersaws and metallic, “candy” timbres that sound deliberately synthetic and hyper-clean.
- Maximalism and glitch: stutters, pitch-bends, sudden drops, and sound effects crammed into every corner. Restraint is not the goal.
- Saccharine pop hooks: underneath the chaos sit genuinely catchy, sweet melodies — the tension between sugary tunes and harsh production is the whole point.
- Extreme contrast: songs lurch between soft, tender verses and blown-out, overwhelming choruses, sometimes within a few seconds.
Tempo is loose and varies a lot, but hyperpop often runs fast — frequently in the 140–170 BPM range — drawing energy from EDM, drum and bass, and the sped-up “nightcore” edits that circulated online in the 2000s and 2010s. That said, plenty of hyperpop slows right down for a ballad before exploding again, so tempo is a tendency, not a rule.
The artists and records that defined hyperpop
A few names come up in almost any honest account of the genre. Knowing them makes the sound click into place.
SOPHIE is often called the genre’s most influential figure. The 2018 album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides showed how far the palette could stretch, from the crushing bass of “Faceshopping” to the fragile ballad “It’s Okay to Cry.” SOPHIE died in 2021, but the fingerprints are all over modern pop production.
A. G. Cook and the wider PC Music roster supplied the aesthetic blueprint and, crucially, mentored others. Charli XCX is the bridge to the mainstream: working closely with Cook and SOPHIE, her mixtape Pop 2 (2017) and the lockdown album how i’m feeling now (2020) took hyperpop ideas into charting pop. 100 gecs — the duo of Dylan Brady and Laura Les — pushed the sound to its gleeful extreme on 1000 gecs (2019), mashing ska, pop-punk, dubstep and Auto-Tune into a two-minute blur. Around them, a younger online wave of “digicore” artists such as glaive and midwxst carried the influence into the 2020s.
The simple pop theory hiding under the chaos
Here is the surprise: strip away the distortion and pitch effects, and a lot of hyperpop rests on familiar, friendly pop harmony. The abrasive surface does the shocking; the chords keep it catchy.
The single most common pop progression, and a hyperpop staple, is the I–V–vi–IV. In C major that is C – G – Am – F. It sounds uplifting and instantly familiar, which is exactly why it works as a sweet centre for chaotic production. A close cousin, the “emotional” order vi–IV–I–V = Am – F – C – G, leans a little more wistful and shows up in the genre’s ballad-leaning moments.
Because hyperpop borrows heavily from emo, pop-punk and video-game music, you will also hear brighter loops like I–IV–V = C – F – G and minor-key runs such as i–VI–III–VII = Am – F – C – G (the same four chords as I–V–vi–IV, just started from the minor). Melodies are frequently built from the plain major scale (in C: C–D–E–F–G–A–B) or the major pentatonic (C–D–E–G–A) for those bright, sing-song hooks. If you want to hear how these stack up, our free scale & chord finder and virtual piano let you play the notes above instantly, and the circle of fifths shows why C major and A minor share the same seven notes.
How a hyperpop track gets built
Producing hyperpop is more about processing and arrangement than about complex writing. A typical build starts from a simple, catchy chord loop — often one of the progressions above — and a clear vocal melody. The transformation happens afterwards: the vocal gets pitched up and hit with hard Auto-Tune; the bass is distorted and saturated until it becomes a texture in its own right; bright synth layers and glitchy fills are piled on; and the arrangement is chopped into sudden contrasts, so a whispery verse can slam into a blown-out drop without warning.
The genre rewards fearlessness over subtlety. Extreme pitch shifts, clipping, bitcrushing and abrupt edits that would be “mistakes” elsewhere are the whole aesthetic here. If you want to sketch a bright pop chord loop or a hook in seconds before you commit to mangling it in your DAW, you can rough one out with a tool like Solmi and then pitch, distort and re-flip it yourself. For the underlying scale, chord and rhythm basics you will lean on, our Theory & Songwriting hub collects the fundamentals in one place.
Where hyperpop sits among related genres
Hyperpop sits at a busy crossroads. It shares the pitched, chopped-vocal DNA and internet-native, platform-driven rise of other online styles — from phonk to amapiano — but points it at sugary pop rather than menace or dance-floor groove. It borrows maximalism and drops from EDM, distorted 808s from trap, sped-up energy from nightcore, and raw melody from emo and pop-punk. Its close younger relatives, “digicore” and “glitchcore,” are essentially hyperpop grown up entirely on SoundCloud and short-form video. That grassroots, laptop-first path is exactly why so many bedroom producers can make convincing hyperpop with nothing but a DAW and a willingness to break the rules.
Frequently asked questions
Is hyperpop the same as PC Music?
No, but they are tightly linked. PC Music is a specific London label and collective, founded by A. G. Cook in 2013, whose glossy, plastic pop is a key origin point for the sound. Hyperpop is the broader umbrella term — popularised by a 2019 Spotify playlist — that covers PC Music, SOPHIE, 100 gecs and the wider internet scene around them. Think of PC Music as one important source and hyperpop as the genre it helped spark.
Why are the vocals always pitched up in hyperpop?
Pitched-up, heavily Auto-Tuned vocals give hyperpop its cartoonish, hyper-real character — the voice sounds synthetic and exaggerated on purpose, matching the plastic synths and oversized bass. It also plays with identity and artificiality, themes many hyperpop artists care about. Once early producers made it central, the high, candy-sweet vocal became one of the genre’s clearest signatures.
What BPM and key should I use to make hyperpop?
There is no fixed tempo, but a lot of hyperpop runs fast and energetic, roughly 140–170 BPM, so that is a solid starting range. Major keys keep the hooks bright — C major is a friendly place to begin — and a I–V–vi–IV loop (C–G–Am–F) gives you an instantly catchy foundation to distort, pitch and glitch to taste.
