When shuffling the Spotify hyperpop playlist, I can’t help but feel disappointed. For years, artists within the genre like A.G. Cook and Kero Kero Bonito have been pushing the limits of music production, creating sounds and compositions that sound like nothing I’ve heard before. Yet when I shuffle the latest song by Bladee or Slayyyter, I feel there is a certain sameness to everything I listen to. A space that was at one point driving things like metal pipe banging and robotic repetition into pop mainstream is now heavily dominated by conventional melodies with the light touches of autotune and dubstep inspired beats.

The song that perhaps epitomizes this type of hyperpop to me is the 100 gecs remix of CMTEN’s NEVER MET! The vocals exhibit a highly produced effect through the synthetic-sounding mixture, but the melody and lyrics could be sung ballad style and fit into any 2000’s pop rock song if slowed down a bit. The backing beats clearly demonstrate some nightcore and early hyperpop influence in their construction and maximalism, but the beat could easily be inserted in a number of other hyperpop songs without a sharp change in identity. Finally, the melody has that virality-seeking factor that dominates all songs seeking promotion on TikTok nowadays. In short, NEVER MET! combines various cookie cutter aspects of hyperpop in their most simplistic form into admittedly a very catchy song.

To be clear, I don’t think that NEVER MET! or the other songs that exhibit similar characteristics are bad songs by any means. I have NEVER MET! on my go to playlist alongside songs from Laura Les and Alice Longyu Gao, two other artists who I think have captured the magic of mass produced hyperpop that still bangs. I also understand that in some respects, hyperpop, in seeking to distill pop music to its core elements and take those elements to their extremes, must have a form in which such elements can be easily swapped in and out. Lastly, I recognize that some of my criticism may come from a place of ignorance - whether it be about the production goals of such songs, the wide array of subgenres that have sprung out of hyperpop, or composition in general.

But even if such songs find success in pursuing such methods, something is still off to me. Early hyperpop seemed to be made with the mindset that artists wanted to explore new ground. Try out different stem combinations. Use knob settings that were previously explicitly discouraged. Toy with what constituted a melody or subvert traditional song structure. In contrast, the songs I mentioned above seem to have a different goal - commercial success. Instead of pursuing interesting combinations that have a possibility of missing, they rehash ideas that are guaranteed to land songs on Spotify playlists and viral TikToks. The artists are pushing music forward, but only in ways that are rather conventional and palatable to a general audience. The actual experimentation is only surface level. I don’t want to say that artists shouldn’t be allowed to seek commercial success. Rather, I’m grateful that hyperpop has any commercial success at all, and I was able to discover it because it was growing more popular. All creatives should have some way to monetize their creations, and creating palatable music for the masses is a totally valid method.

In some ways, this phenomenon reminds me of an old argument within the 2010s indie music scene. As chronicled in Stereogum, in 2017, David Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors posted an Instagram post questioning whether indie music was now “both bad and boujee…mostly miming a codified set of sounds & practices whose significance is inherited.” In other words, that indie music had gone through a similar process of mostly employing sounds and techniques that had already found success. Robin Pecknold responded with a statement that I think crystalized the difference - “there is a always a vast expanse of feeling being explored by everyone engaged in music and it’s all valid in that it defines a feeling or creates a new one, for whatever group or groups have their ears turned on that music.” Effectively, even if such music is derivative, it doesn’t really matter so long as the listening audience finds emotions that can only be captured by that genre of music. In addition, this music still has the capacity to deliver new experiences to people who may not be as familiar with the genre’s history. To complete the analogy, there are tons of listeners who are finding new modes of expression that they relate to through the hyperpop playlist, and if the music continues to provide a unique thought/vibe provoking experience for them, it is valid.

But despite my intellectual acknowledgement of validity, I’m still frustrated. And to be frank, I think a lot of the source of my frustration with the direction of the genre is directly related to SOPHIE’s tragic death. For months after their passing was first announced in late January, I couldn’t listen to songs they wrote or produced without getting deeply emotional. But over the past couple of weeks, I think I’ve reached a point where I can focus on celebrating SOPHIE’s achievements rather than what could have been. I’ve been listening to PRODUCT and its remixes on repeat, and it surprises me how many things from that album still have yet to be truly explored. The monotonously minimalist opening of L.O.V.E. The almost horn-like backing of VYZEE. There are so many interesting sections that I’ve never heard sampled or built upon that create incredibly distinct experiences, so when I hear yet another standard hyperpop beat, it pains me to think that these techniques may never be adequately explored. Im scared that the taste-defining nature of Spotify playlists will pigeonhole hyperpop into increasingly similar songs when there is room to do much, much more

That being said, one of the interesting aspects about Spotify’s hyperpop playlist is that curators rotate quite frequently. Instead of relying on its inhouse curation team, Spotify gives ownership of the playlist to musicians and producers for a week or two. While I was writing this piece, Charli XCX and A.G. Cook curated the playlist for a week (copied in this Youtube Music playlist). To my excitement, their selections had much more variety than the monotonous drone I’d grown used to from other curators. Songs from artists such as girl_irl and Rustie that I had never heard on the usual rotation popped out to me, bursting with passion and the spirit of experimentation that I get from SOPHIE songs. And many or the original boundary pushers of hyperpop are still very active, with A.G. Cook and Arca putting out interesting new music on a fairly regular basis. The creative passion for creating new types of hyperpop is clearly still there. I just hope that the listening community catches up and rewards these makers for the groundbreaking art they’re creating.