What are we calling the past few years in underground dance pop? Surely it’s not “indie sleaze,” a theme-party dress code that’s been kicking around for years. Today’s sleaziest indie producers are blending in cloud rap, 2010s EDM, and hyperpop to assemble dance-pop music that sounds simultaneously dirty, sweet, and Xeroxed to hell.
It’s the sound associated with burgeoning acts like Snow Strippers, Frost Children, MGNA Crrrta, and Fcukers; it’s everywhere on the season’s standout new alt-pop records, in slushy and sarcastic synth tracks from Slayyyter, Ninajarichi, Six Sex, and Tiffany Day; it’s the sound of still-underground stars like Cannelle, Suzy Sheer, Joey Cash, Somewhere Special, and the Twins. Can we call it something?
People have been trying to lump these sounds together somehow. “idk what to call this genre but you know what it is, snow strippers, mgna crrrta, anna luna, bassvictim … i just know that the worst ppl listen to this kind of music,” goes the title of a Spotify playlist assembled by user “more evil” in November 2024, also featuring the Hellp, the Shygirl remix of Charli xcx’s “365,” a band called Brothel in Belize that I’ll tell you about later, and (throwback) CSS. “the blog-house end of the indie sleaze continuum is exemplified by the cloudier textures of snow strippers and fakemink,” the galaxy-brained musician &friends wrote last year, clearly hearing it too. A similar same-yet-different set of acts played Palomosa Festival in Montreal this spring, featuring headliners MGMT (DJ set) and fakemink, plus Xaviersobased and Thaiboy Digital, POiSON GiRLFRiEND and Dylan Brady, Canelle and ear. This lineup was “almost like an experiment,” observed another performer, CFCF’s Michael Silver, in a podcast interview at the event. “They’re tapping into a very zeitgeisty idea of what goes together, generationally.”
What we’re witnessing is this decade’s great reimagining of electroclash. It is helping to fuel both an ongoing revival of the classic sound and a new manifestation—an evolution that feels nostalgic for Daft Punk and Drain Gang in equal measure. The “indie sleaze” trend and the massive success of Charli xcx’s BRAT helped to summon a new segment of the world’s pop fans to a particular era of club classics, dialed up with a noisy, bass-boosted edge primed by years of mainstage dance, hip-hop, and hyperpop. Nonsense hooks and Jersey club kicks and stupid drops and digicore glitch: It all fits into the grimy, clubby, approximately 130-bpm electroclash idiom, one that’s long since assimilated the massive electro-pop bangers c. 2007-2008 (“Time to Pretend,” “D.A.N.C.E.,” “Just Dance”). The aesthetic is glittery texture and low-res surveillance video, the stereofield blitzed with snow, the governing mindset a detached pose (and sometimes explicit vulnerability) as a protective adaptation amid the endless horrorscroll. Let’s call it hyperclash.
Hyperclash is a hybrid, as was electroclash, when it was forming in the mid-’90s. “At the time, there wasn’t a lot of material to choose from, just like at the beginning of house music, there wasn’t a lot of vinyl to actually use,” says Larry Tee, the veteran DJ and writer of drag queen tracks. “There was some European, German stuff that was great, and certainly DJ Hell’s [International DeeJay] Gigolo Records had some tracks that were popular, but we really had to mix in a combination of the electro-disco-punk from the past and the latest stuff.” In 2001, impassioned by the sound and style of up-and-coming acts like Fisherspooner and Chicks on Speed, Tee took out an $80,000 loan and organized an Electroclash Festival in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It garnered so much attention in alternative media (he mentions his then-roommate worked at Vice) that the name caught on more widely. The next year, a skeptical Kimya Dawson would introduce the trend to MTV viewers. The popular image of electroclash—vampy, campy, fake European—would find its way into chart-topping pop hits of the recession era while its scuzzier techno origins remained happily obscure.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
