Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000145 · Music & Sounds → TikTok breakthrough hits · 2019-2023
Hyperpop
Electronic music built for TikTok's glitchy, maximalist moment
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“Hyperpop's ticket would have cost Old Town Road its seat. The horse stays.”
Why Noah said no
The TikTok hits group already holds Gangnam Style, Old Town Road and Ocean Man. Getting Hyperpop in would mean throwing out Old Town Road as well as Ocean Man, and a $30 beat that spent 19 weeks at number one shows TikTok's pull on the charts better than a genre does.
- Rejected
- 27 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 55.9 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpop
What it is
Hyperpop is an electronic music genre that emerged from UK underground labels like PC Music in the early 2010s and went viral on TikTok around 2019, particularly through songs like 100 Gecs' Money Machine. It uses heavily processed vocals, distorted synths, jarring production and references to 2000s internet culture, often paired with ironic or angsty lyrics.
Why it’s internet culture
Gen Z used hyperpop to explore gender and identity through pitched, modulated vocals and queer subcultural aesthetics, and the genre exploded on Alt TikTok during lockdowns as a way to reject conventional pop structure. When hyperpop hit the mainstream, the artists who created it publicly rejected the label, showing how online subcultures fracture once they scale.
Hyperpop shows a scene born on SoundCloud and PC Music getting named by Spotify's metadata, spread by a playlist and Alt TikTok during lockdown, and then disowned by its own artists once it went mainstream. Queer and trans musicians used its pitched, processed vocals to experiment with how their voices and genders came across.
What Noah read
Hyperpop is an electronic music movement and loosely defined subgenre that originated in the early 2010s in the United Kingdom. It is characterised by an exaggerated or maximalist take on 21st century popular music tropes and typically integrates pop and avant-garde sensibilities while drawing on elements commonly found in electronic, rock, hip-hop, and dance music. The origins of hyperpop are primarily traced back to the output of English musician A. G. Cook's record label and art collective PC Music, with associated artists Sophie, GFOTY, Hayden Dunham, Hannah Diamond, and Charli XCX, helping to pioneer a musical style that was later known as "bubblegum bass". In 2019, the genre experienced a rise in popularity with the virality of the song "Money Machine" by 100 Gecs, and was further proliferated by Spotify, whose employee Lizzy Szabo launched the influential "Hyperpop" playlist, after spotting the term "hyperpop" on the platform's metadata, which had previously been added by data analyst Glenn McDonald in 2018. Following this, the style gained wider popularity among Gen Z through social media platforms like TikTok, particularly on Alt TikTok, which boosted its exposure during t…
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“The TikTok hits group already holds Gangnam Style, Old Town Road and Ocean Man. Getting Hyperpop in would mean throwing out Old Town Road as well as Ocean Man, and a $30 beat that spent 19 weeks at number one shows TikTok's pull on the charts better than a genre does.”