Bradford Nordeen at Artforum:
As a musician, Charli XCX was born online. Her first album circulated via CD-Rs and MySpace when the artist was just fourteen. Journalists love to drop this detail, but seldom do they follow up on how this ever-shifting www. vernacular inflects her songwriting style. Her compositions often hinge on the repetition of single words or phrases, like “focus,” “airport,” or “number one.” Syncopation spins the familiar into an earworm, disarticulating the very meaning of a lyric into a melodic vibe. After a couple of major-label albums failed to connect, Charli saw promise in how this approach might marry with the emergent underground PC Music movement. Spearheaded by the late SOPHIE and A. G. Cook, these sound sculptors used vocal modulation to transform any bedroom singer into a K-pop star—displaced within a synthetic landscape that was critically unreal, pixelated and vast. The Vroom Vroom EP (2016) was Charli’s first stab at this sound and the recipient of great vitriol from her label and critics alike. Eight years on, that sound has become the genre of music called Hyperpop.
more here.
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