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, Ninajirachi, 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.