While “What kind of music do you listen to?” is a good opener, I think “What music do you hate?” tells you more about a person. Are you the type to sit and grimace through a song you don’t like, or do you put in a request? What specifically is most offensive: the rhythm, or lack thereof, bland or vulgar lyricism, an overly contrived purpose? The reasoning can be valid, taste is of course personal, but a testament to good art is that it provokes a strong reaction, even if it’s negative. In my opinion, the worst thing music can do is be boring. Hyperpop, a new and loosely defined genre informed by grunge, bubblegum pop, and nostalgic internet culture, is certainly anything but boring. The saturated pop-music market of the 2010’s led counter-culturalists to draw on an ironic, flashy, glitchy version of pop; the type of music that makes Boomers lose faith. Pioneering artists include British artists Sophie and Charli XCX, though hyperpop became more concretely defined when Spotify titled a playlist with the name, heavily featuring 100 Gecs. The responsibility of defining the genre seems to fall on 100 gecs, composed of singer-producers Laura Les and Dylan Brady, and their newest album is certainly more structured and cohesive than the first, cementing the genre and their influence over it.
10,000 gecs is just 27 minutes long, short enough to get stuck in your head and long enough for your roommate to get annoyed by the blasting static. It’s referential, using iconic sounds from the internet boom like the THX Deep Note, Scary Movie, or 2007 YouTube Spongebob memes; the sound bites are jarring yet calculated. It’s obvious producers Les and Brady know the structure of a mass-appealing pop song, they just choose to ignore it, accenting the rhythms with absurd and constant interjections, like clickbait. On first listen, it’s easy to get distracted by the leaps in tonality, but there is a sincerity that shouldn’t be overlooked.
The vocals are heavily autotuned or deafeningly harsh, sometimes blending with the backtrack or in stark contrast to it. The lyricism is ironically devoid of content, but absurdly metaphorical. “Frog on the Floor” is a drawn-out metaphor about social anxiety leading to substance abuse: “I heard that he was telling croaks at the party…Give him some space, he doesn’t know what people think about” juxtaposed by an upbeat tracking and playful ribbits, with the last quarter turning into a drunken stupor. My favorite might be “mememe,” the closing track and possibly the most palatable on the album. Its lyrics are hard to make out over the bass-boosted tracking, sounding like a video game outro that wouldn’t be out of place in a club remix. Repeated in the chorus is “I guess you’ll never know anything about me,” where the vocal loops remind me of Bo Burnham’s “We Think We Know You,” and the strain of the audience-performer relationship. The verses reflect a relationship gone bad because the speaker feels they aren’t being heard. The vagueness and disjointed nature give you what you want to get out of it, even a literal interpretation could yield different results from different listeners.
This album is a straight-through listening experience, best felt in noise-canceling headphones or blasted through car speakers. If you’re around those unfamiliar, you might be able to get away with slipping “Hollywood Baby,” “mememe,” or “757” into a queue without much judgment, but tracks like “Doritos & Fritos” or “Frog on the Floor” will likely get you booted off aux. One British reviewer described 100 gecs enjoyers as “sticky iPad babies who have been assaulted by the internet since birth, who watched all their lockdown homeschooling videos on double speed, and get bored unless there are at least three sources of entertainment going at once.” I’ll give him 2/4.
