Special Issue: Hyperpop’s Hyperlinks

‘what is hyperpop?’, asked Charli XCX back in 2020 on Twitter. This special issue of Popular Music contemplates this question while investigating how and to whom the genre matters. Hyperpop’s roots are often traced back to the UK-based PC Music label in the mid-2010s, but equally important are the online communities active on platforms such as Discord, Twitter, and Soundcloud which were later recognised and amplified by Spotify’s ‘Hyperpop’ playlist, started in 2019 (Dandridge-Lemco 2020). The phenomenon flourished in online spaces before (but intensified during) the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Hyperpop has been called a microgenre (Miller 2024), a subgenre of post-internet music (Affaticati 2024), and even a “genre-less” genre that provides a parody of pop, especially when viewed through a camp lens (Bates et al. 2024). It also necessitates a reassessment of longstanding theoretical debates in popular music studies via close attention to the generational politics and musical coping mechanisms of Gen Z hyperpop fans (Spencer 2022). Although it can be seen and heard as politically progressive, hyperpop is simultaneously the ‘GMO-baby of the astute data analysts at Spotify’ (Miller 2024, 173). It is often nostalgic (Fowler 2023), yet it is also a product of a zeitgeist shaped by social media platforms, internet memes, and algorithmically-imagined marketing strategies, with Charli XCX’s brat being a notable example. Emerging from a post-internet aesthetic turn (e.g. Harper 2017; Haworth & Born 2018), hyperpop has often been associated with queerness, nonbinary gender identity, and transhuman futurity – particularly with reference to the artistry of SOPHIE. It has also involved itself in digital recalibrations of liveness and musical sociality via Open Pit Minecraft in-game concerts (Moritzen 2022), stem sharing in Discord servers, and livestreamed ‘battle of the bands’ events on Twitch.

         In crude terms, hyperpop is a complex phenomenon that demands renewed attention to both longstanding and ‘trending’ issues in popular music studies. Because hyperpop is defined by web-based entanglement and multiplicity, the phenomenon necessitates a wide range of critical approaches, theoretical frameworks, and empirical methodologies. With this special issue we aim to explore the sonic, visual, sociocultural, and political dimensions of a phenomenon that has already left a distinctive imprint on both young fans and mainstream popular culture as a whole. Arguably, hyperpop has been one of the most significant developments in the history of popular music since the turn of the millennium, and we invite a broad range of submissions from early career researchers, independent scholars, and established professors, either in traditional feature article format or as written-out roundtable discussions on a specific theme. Potential topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Hyperpop-centred interventions in longstanding debates about popular music and its theorisation (from CCCS subcultural theory to notions of scenes and tribes, the turn to genre theory, concerns with accelerationism, and so on).
• Reflections on the strengths and limitations of genre theory in music studies from an internet studies perspective, including (re)considerations of hyperpop vis-à-vis meme theory, vibe theory, the ‘internet aesthetic’ concept, notions of hype cycles, and the turn to post-viral algorithmic phenomena.
• Ludomusicological approaches to hyperpop and virtual in-game concerts with reference to longstanding debates about the concept of play from Huizinga (1938) and digital performance (e.g. Collins, 2013; Fritsch, 2021).
• Interdisciplinary and historical perspectives on hyperpop and (post-)irony, pastiche, détournement, and online-offline trolling practices.
• The long (pre- and proto)-internet history of hyperpop, including (hyper)links with prog, glam, punk, New Romantic synth pop, pop punk, early rave music, and so on.
• Critical perspectives on the role of streaming services such as Spotify in the creation and curation of emergent microgenres such as hyperpop. 
• Sociological and/or historical analysis of hyperpop and (inter)generational politics in the age of permacrisis.
• The audiovisual aesthetics of hyperpop content on TikTok and music videos on YouTube.
• Critical perspectives on the political economy of hyperpop and its monetization in the age of platform capitalism.
• Hyperpop in the age of political diagonalism and far-right populism, such as analysis of ‘Kamala IS brat’ during the 2024 US Presidential Race or other case studies.
• Critical discussions of hyperpop and trash aesthetics in the age of online shitposting and the corporate choreography of ‘enshittification’ (cf. Doctorow 2025).
• Emic and etic perspectives on hyperpop as a musical coping mechanism among ‘born digital’ members of Gen-Z.
• Emic and etic perspectives on the idea of hyperpop as the sonification of queerness and/or nonbinary gender identity.
• Intersectional analysis of hyperpop, race, queerness, and digital orientalism.
• Hyperpop’s (hyper)links with electronic dance music, from Danny L Harle’s HARLECORE album (2021), to the Laura Les and Dylan Brady collaborations with Skrillex, and so on.
• The posthumous legacy of SOPHIE vis-à-vis the history of popular music and/or synthesis.
• Archival and/or institutional histories of the PC Music label and the early experiments of A. G. Cook, SOPHIE, Danny L Harle, Hannah Diamond, et al. in London.
• Hyperpop and 1990s / 2000s nostalgia, anemoia, and post-internet retrofuturism.

 

Please submit your paper proposal (c.300 words) by email to hyperpopspecialissue@gmail.com by 15 June 2026.

Following review, selected articles will be commissioned in July 2026. We hope to have full articles submitted in December 2026, with final materials uploaded to ScholarOne in April 2027.

 

If you require more information, please email the co-editors directly:

 

Karina Moritzen Barbosa (Universidade Federal Fluminense & Universität Oldenburg) karina.moritzen@uni-oldenburg.de

Michiel Kamp (Universiteit Utrecht)

M.Kamp1@uu.nl

Ed Katrak Spencer (Universiteit Utrecht)

e.c.k.spencer@uu.nl

Chananja Clement (Universiteit Utrecht)

chananjaclement@hotmail.com

 

References

Affaticati, Lucia. 2024. “Post-Internet Music: Negotiating Queer Identity in the Digital Era.”    Brief Encounters 8(1): 1-15. https://doi.org/10.24134/BE.20... 

Bates, Eliot, Sophie Delphis, Romulo Moraes, and Julia Santoli. “Assembling Hyperpop:         Genre Formation on Wikipedia.” Cultural Sociology.     https://doi.org/10.1177/174997... 

Charli (@charli_xcx). 2020. “what is hyperpop?” Twitter, July 22.             https://x.com/charli_xcx/statu...

Collins, Karen. 2013. Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in        Video Games. The MIT Press.

Dandridge-Lemco, Ben. 2020. “How Hyperpop, a Small Spotify Playlist, Grew into a Big        Deal.” The New York Times, November 10.       https://www.nytimes.com/2020/1... 

Doctorow, Corey. 2025. Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to          Do About It. MCD.

Fowler, Kate. “The nostalgia of hyperpop and why it’s probably here to stay.” OffChance, 3            Sept. 2023, https://off-chance.com/articles/hyperpop-music-popularity

Fritsch, Melanie. 2021. “Game – Music – Performance: Introducing a Ludomusicological     Theory and Framework.” In The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited      by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers. Cambridge University Press.

Harper, Adam. 2017. “How Internet music is frying your brain.” Popular Music 36(1): 86-97.             https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143016000696

Haworth, Christopher, and Georgina Born. 2018. From microsound to vaporwave: Internet-  mediated musics, online methods, and genre. Music & Letters 98(4): 601-647. 

Huizinga, Johan. 1938. Homo ludens: Proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der          cultuur. Tjeenk Willink.

Miller, Mairin. 2024. “‘Back to 1999’: Exploring Speculative Nostalgia with Hyperpop.” In             Sound Research for Troubling Times: Hope in Crisis, edited by jessie l. Beier and   Owen Chapman. Palgrave Macmillan.

Moritzen, Karina. 2022. Opening Up Virtual Mosh Pits: Music Scenes and In-Game Concerts            in Fortnite and Minecraft. Journal of Sound and Music in Games 3(2-3): 115-        140. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsmg.2...

Spencer, Edward Katrak. 2022. “On internet subcultures & PC Music (Part II): A      reappraisal.” University of Birmingham Blogs (blog).             https://blog.bham.ac.uk/digsocmus/2022/03/14/on-internet-subcultures-and-pc-    musicpart-2/

 

Special Issue Editors

Karina Moritzen (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Communication at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro, and in Musicology at the University of Oldenburg. Her current research is interested in the affordances made possible through in-game concerts in terms of digital materialities, ludomusical performance, and hyperpop. She has previously presented her work at Ludomusicology conferences, as well as published an early excerpt of her PhD thesis at the Journal of Sound and Music in Games and the Eco-Pós journal in Brazil. In 2023, she organised the first congress focused on music and videogames in Brazil (musiludens) in Rio de Janeiro, and she is a founding member of the recently created ALLUM (Associação Latinoamericana de Ludomusicologia - www.allum.lat).

Michiel Kamp (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Utrecht University, where he teaches on music and audio-visual media. Michiel is co-founder of the UK-based Ludomusicology research group, which has organised yearly conferences on video game music in the UK and abroad since 2011, and he has co-edited a volume Ludomusicology: Approaches to Video Game Music based on these conferences. His research currently centres on video game music and music in other digital cultures, with a particular interest in phenomenologies and hermeneutics of listening. His monograph Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music was published with Oxford University Press in 2024.

Ed Katrak Spencer (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Screen & Music Cultures at Utrecht University. His recent research has focused on hyperpop music videos and Beyoncé-related online conspiracy theories, while his work on the weaponization of dubstep in internet trolling strategies was recently published in Twentieth-Century Music. He is co-founder of the Music and Online Cultures Research Network (MOCReN) and is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Online Music Cultures with Kate Galloway, Steven Gamble, and Paula Harper. He has received expert comment requests concerning music celebrity conspiracy theories from The Independent (UK) and The New York Times (USA).

Chananja Clement (she/her) is a recent RMA graduate in Musicology from Utrecht University. Her research explores the intersections of music and identity, with a focus on voice, technology, gender, sexuality, and community. She is also active as a musician and radio programmer, where voice and technology remain central to her artistic practice, especially in relation to collective listening.