In a YouTube video from late October 2020, a 15-year-old rapper called glaive frolics in the woods dressed as a raccoon. He peeks over at a log cabin, where he and a small cohort of other teenage woodland creatures, including fellow artist ericdoa, begin raiding the bins. “I’m so pissed, I’m angry as fuck / I wanna kill myself, but you’re calling my bluff,” glaive sings in an unaffected tone over a chirpy chiptune beat. Listened to more than 1.5 million times, it has a pounding, pixellated style that is both insanely catchy and unsettling. It’s what you would imagine 2020 to sound like if you plugged it into a sound deck and simultaneously smashed it against the wall.
Despite only making music since the beginning of the pandemic, the now-16-year-old musician has become one of the breakout stars of a glitchy, amorphous wave of online rap that Spotify curators want to call hyperpop. A favourite subject of debate among dedicated music circles, the genre is a catchall for the extremely online strain of disruptive, maximalist pop made popular by TikTok videos and Spotify playlists. The word is often used to describe the bouncy electropop of
