Genre Amalgamation in London Song

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It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier CRM, accounting, inventory, e commerce and more And the best part, OdDu replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you Try Odoo for free at odoo. com That's O d oo d. com Welcome towitchhom Pop. I'm producer Rhna Cruz. I'm musicologist Nate Soan and I' songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, Nade, I'm here to talk to you guys today about a new sound coming up in pop music right now. Let's go. Some could call it Didy pop. others could call it post hyper pop but it's a sound that I think is going to take over the charts in the next few years. And I've personally come to label it Feral pop Barl pop. And the thing is, Feral pop can sound like many things. It could sound like this it could also sound like this And the wild thing is it could also sound like this. Yeah my girl. ye my girl. C here Necklace P, whisper slow in your ear What's making you feel feral? Well, I think there's a few things going on here. It's music that is a little bit obtuse. There's a little bit of a barrier to entry It's not really connected to the big ticket pop artists in mainstream music, the way that like Chapel Rone is indebted to Lady Gaga or Gracy Abrams is indebted to Taylor Swift. It's like the biggest artists in the world are influential folks like Srills heap The late producer Sophie Things like that And the music is more instinctual I find it to be pop music at its most primal and the definition of feral is to be undomesticated and reverted back to a wild state of being. And I think this music is feral because it's making pop exciting and unpredictable, even if it doesn't immediately present itself as pop music And it sounds like a cat without a home shrieking in heat in the dead of night Red It makes you feel feral. Yes.. Okay, there we go. And those songs that I just played are by three artists that I find really embody the Feral pop ethos, Nina Geraci, underscores and T Hollis. And I'm guessing each of these artists' names is stylized in lowercase letters with no spaces ust going out on a limb there. Nina's properly capitalizedost. But the other two, you're right on the money. I stand dreirected. Okay. This week, I want the three of us to listen to the artists that I find to be the three most important in this scene and figure out why is now the time that everyone's getting farewell on and we are ready to be school And to do that I want to start by defining what we're hearing in the feral pop sound There's a love of dubsteps and DiM As I said earlier, the DJ Skrillix is more or less the North star to everything in this micro genre. Yeah ion There's also a devotion to the internet tenology, the sounds of the digital world, with lyrics that tend to be a little bit meta about set technology, the discomfort of fame, even music itself And last but not least, there's a tendency to amalgamate genres within feral pop. Even amongst the three artists that we're going to be talking about this week, all of these things I mentioned result in an overall extremely online sensibility. When it comes to Feral Pop, which makes sense considering the fanbes that love them are Gen Z and Younger groups that have essentially come of age on the internet. So I feel like the place to start would be with your first artist, Nina Jirachi? Absolutely. Speaking of being extremely online There's no better place to start with her and her album aptly titled I loveove My Computer That was the song Pod Touch Okay, hold on. I heard a shout out to FL Studio, which a lot of EDM and hip hop producers just start on this piece of software to make music because it's basically free, formererly known as frruity loooops. The lyrics are so just sort of thrown out as if someone just like Here I am on the microphone. I got to come up with some words. It sounds like a laptop I'm writing an N FL studio. It's very off the cuff. And as you could hear, it speaks to one of the main tenants of Feral Pop. a devotion of technology and the embrace of digital aesthetic. Yeah, she mentions Fruity Loops or FL Studio. She mentions her computer, she mentions an iPod touch in a yellow Pikachu case. As you could tell from the albums title, I love my computer and the lyrics of this song There is a fetishizing of technology here and specifically technology from previous eras. My quick Google search iPod touchline introduced in two thousand seven. This is a core like web one point zero. Bter time and easier time Yeah, this song speaks fondly of that web one point zero realness. you know, the computer here is an object of affection rather than a piece of machinery. And are coming apocalyptic destruction, according to all of the you know AI company CEOs. A utopic era is where we find ourselves in this track. You know, It's evocative. The core metaphor of the song is that Nina Doraci hears a song on our iPod touch that reminds her of all these childhood memories. She sings, It sounds like first day starting year eight It sounds like Beach dayay. You know, she's recalling all of these things that are brought to her because of an iPod And the way her voice floats in as she coos about the titular iPod touch yellow Pikachu case, it's a very familiar image and it feels very comforting. Is that like a Pikachu saying It sounds. What does that? sayay that again Charlie Im sorry, I didn't catch it It sounds. Well Pikachu famously can only say Pikachu. . Yeah L at a really high voice. This is an evolved Pikach chu. This is the next one. Is that like Raiich chu? Come on. Damn, that was cold Ran. I didn't have to do him like that One of us here grew up watching Pokemon and it's not the other two people I'm on the call with I appreciate the song sounding like It should be about a romantic relationship with another person. Yeah. exxcept it's about That's very compelling to me And I get it I mean it reminds me of something actually I heard the artist Holly Heerndon say, which is that You know, your computer is kind of everything. It's where you make music It's where you faceetime and talk to your friends. It's where you watch shows. It's where you Look at memes. It's like What a crazy relationship. How many people do you have that kind of deep relationship with, especially in the twenty first century I'm surprised we don't have more odes. to the laptop. I think about the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirkey, which was published in two thousand nine, which is sort of about the promise of The internet's going to make a place where we can all communicate and belong and tear down the old gatekeepers, which effectively comes true in the decadade since Maybe with a bunch of ramifications towards our wellbeing and romantic relationship to these platforms, that's really changed There's a strong view of techno optimism in this song and all of Nina Deracci's work. And on iPod Touch specifically, maybe it's this electronic trancy reverb heavy vocal It feels so familiar And it connects largely to the Gen Z experience because people like myself grew up alongside this technology, Nina Doraci, a little bit of background. She's twenty six years old, two months older than me. She's Australian, which I think is cool to note. We don't really get many Australian pop imports other than like Kylie Minogue and Olivia Newton John. Kevin Parker, Tam and Paul, but not a lot Nina Daci is a relatively new artist. She broke through in twenty seventeen. and has released a bunch of EPs, including one that I love, called Girl EDM. There's a song on it called Nina Kamina, titled after a combination of her name and the featured artist, Iszzy Kamina . Wh I think I like this song so much because it harkens back to something I said earlier of Skrills being the North star For these artists, listen to the beginning of Nina Camuna. We have this whoopy steppy thing happening It reminds me of a lot of Srylllic songs, including my favorite the track Rock and' Roll Is' knking off I love Whoopy Steppy. The great news about electronic music is that there's so many musical techniques that we just get to invent new words. and I think you've got it right. Both of these songs have this sort of gated synth sound or sampled sound that comes in on the offbeat and creates this dancy propulsion, the sort of kind of feel And they both like to play with high pitched vocals That little pikachu thing, which is not Pkachu because I've just learned the Pkachuo always is Pikachu and high voice. I heard the same kind of voice in the Srill extract Is' roking Yeah, I'm not gonna to pretend like I'm a huge dubstep head or bro step, which I've learned is the Sryllix sub genre of dubstep That is very festival and bro like. But I am a scirllicked. and I think I love his early stuff because it has the stubby beat, it has massive drops There's quick stuttering switch ups And it's a fusion of electronic sounds with rock music energy all in the bucket of what is firmly a pop song You know, the classic example of that is Skrills's bangerang G around Gace. H You're taking me back to Burning Man twenty twelve three AM crazy parties. I always forget you're a Burning Man guy, Charlie It's happened. It's happened. That was the sound though. That was the sound that everyone was playing. It's really dark music, frankly to hear in the middle of the night out in the desert. But to your point though, it is as much dance music as it owes to rock. You've got those guitars Banging a rang is almost just like head bang your head. That is the movie you want to do when you hear this music, att least I do. And I think a lot of that comes from Skrills, AKA Sonny Moore's previous career as a post hard core musician in the band from firstirst to last. He's putting that rock hardcore ethos into electronic music and then dressing it up like it's a pop song. And in the context of Nina Diraci, thinking of the title of Nina's EP Girl EDM that Nina Kamina is on It seems to be winkingly referencing that sound by giving the bro step vibe a feminine energy and skew and kind of refreshing it a little bit. It's kind of like Riot Girl was to the like alt and punk movement of the nineties GirllyDM is a response to bro step. A combination of words no one has ever said before There's hints of that in all of Nina Doracci's music. flashing forward to twenty twenty five As I said, Nina's record, I love My compputer was released. It is her debut album The album is essentially a fever dream, as we heard in iPod Touch, but that internet devotion reaches a fever pitch with the song my computer. What? Oh whoa, whoa heyy. What did it ever do wrong? It's just trying to take all of our jobs Sounds like an AL startup Cut This is reinforcing my long held belief that Dubstep and now Girl EDM are fundamentally inspired by the early sounds of dial up interternet. music sounds like what happens when you log on to AOL. D d you get Th! Welcome. You've got mail. Yeah, that was my first thought and it goes back to one of the tenets of Feral Pop, the emphasis of digital textures. The use of this synth that sounds like a dial up modem and is inviting nostalgia, but also updating it in the context of this love song to a computer It's That fascinating, right? We have the steppy base, but we also have these vocals with these digitized elements. There's the bleeping of the F bomb There's the computer interpretation of the word Nina Even the processing on the vocals feels a little strange and artificial P it off. Be no one in the world knows me f all. Mond It says So clarification, Nate and I got the title wrong when we heard Y. We thought it was an aggressive, you know, punt the computer out the window kind of computer complete opposite. It's really an escalation of loving your computer. taking that idea to its logical And I think the logical conclusion is the drop the song, which is fully digitized, the textures are taken to the maximum. It feels like the machine becomes one with the woman singing the lyrics as this statement of I want to bleep my computer leads into this Dubstep EDM huge Ultra Miami drop And the idea of two becoming one, woman and computer It emphasizes the vocals also expand and become an abstracted machine texture themselves later in the song She becomes the computer. That's feral. It reminds me of Skrill X and DubSep two in the way that that drop is just It Kind of the manipulation of a single tone. It's just like that glitchy computerized noise But it gets a rhythm an a syncopation and a feel by the way Minadiraci like side chains it to the beat, so it kind of pulses in and out and all of a sudden this tone which could be whichich is something you would hear in your daily life and you'd be like, o, that's sonoxious. All of a sudden, it becomes this thing that like makes you want to move and groove. and it's like the embodiment of that idea of the digital becoming soulful. We work so hard to anthropomorphize the computer and make them lovable. It makes me think back to like the IMac G three, which came out in the late nineties and ran through the early two thousands. This was like that old CRT Johnny Iive designed apppple that had beautiful color sides and you could get the color that matched your personality. That's a classic. I've always wanted to of those. Yeah. And it's like you can imagine Nina Zarachi, like having that computer att home, that's where FL Studio was first downloaded. And that style of computer was like, wow, we loved that thing. It was an object. It was desirable. It was playful, it was fun And now that computers feel more and more human, we are approaching this uncanny valley where we no longer want to romantically fuck our computers. We want to like literally fuck them up and get them out of our lives because they are trying to be too much like us. And the anthropomorphizing of computers no longer feels good. And I think for a lot of Gen Z and G Alpha people era of technology is something to pine after because as adults, we've only known the evil era of the computer. And the pleasant era of technology that Nina sings about in iPod Touch, there's an element of nostalgia to it that influences the way that these digital textures are incorporated into this feral pop sound. Support for the show comes from AT and T You know what's great about summer, all those plans we made, they finally make it out of the group chat It seemems like there's more time to fit everyone in whatever you've got in store this summer capturing those moments is a must And you can do that with the iPhone seventeen Pro from AT and T The center stage front camera framing auto adjusts to fit everyone into group selfies You don't even have to turn your phone, no overcropping or asking strangers to take it. Just the perfect group selfie every time. 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You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responssees set upp required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus So naturally, Fuck My compomputer is kind of the thesis statement of everything that's happening on I loveove My compputer. And while I do love that song and its core message and how it embodies a lot of what the genre speaks to I also wantna talk about the first song on the record, the Track London song, because I think it also encapsulates the entirety of Feral Pop. Let's start from the top. Started bass guitar. But to London I've ever been to London Cer I love this kind of music. Right from the beginning, we have a sound that I find similar to like dance punk, right? where dance punk music fused rock and electronic together. We hear that in this opening bass situation. V LCD sound systems. feel like a scenager It's dirty, it's grimy In regards to the attention to aesthetic that is in a lot of feral Pop, I see it evoking the aesthetic of Indy Sleaz. Brooklyn millennial two thousands era, you know, Williamsburg before bankers lived there. Gen Z has fetishized this aesthetic, this era, this music over the years, so it makes sense that we hear it here. But also taking what we heard in F my compputer and applying it here The guitar also sounds like a chopped up printer noise or something. Like it's dark, it's digital, it's mechanical to London. You know, when you're printing something and it's like super in color and so it's taking a million years and you just hear the printer going back and forth again, like It's like you put that into a song. It's genius. I really enjoy this style of writing because it's where you have to kind of write a song and then resample and chop that song up. So the song is the remix of the thing that you recorded. That bass is a bass line, someone recorded down and then reversed, pitched around, made that printer sound. we hear the same thing with her vocal I never been to London, It's not like one straight song through vocal. It keeps getting chopped and stuttered Tue that's true.'s true, that's true that's Ied to landil uland u u It's almost like the computer and the human merge together. in this era of music, Daf Punk was doing a lot of micro chopping where they were taking little pieces, resampling them, giving you those stutters. So I'm not surprised that we're hearing them alongside the sort of electrocash kind of bass sound as well. Yeah, and this is really clear when the beat drops in the song and we move from this electro Clash vibe into full festival EDM, you know side chain synth switch up Oh yeah. that's very early justice sort of not as much dumbstep, more of the justice cross of like cross, literally the album cross was this crossover between rock and dance music of that exact same era So we already have the dance punky vibes, we have the EDM vibes. and then there's a switch up into a full on pop melody chorus as the drop gets filtered out. H computer is back. If the drop was giving cross The melody is giving civilization by justice. Cusad Whoa, I hear it. Sort of descending minor melodies, long legato. She's studying the things I grew up on, I swear. The lyrics of this section of London's song are the meta ironic kind that we've heard before and that is prevalent in a lot of feral pop. She starts the song by saying that she's never been to London And in this section, this pop chorus, she clarifies that anything is possible with fingers, eyes, a mouse, and a screen That's quite a reveal. You think like, o, this is about someday getting on a plane and going to London. It's like, no, I can go there virtually. It' called Google Earth. Yeah, it's It's so in keeping with with I love my computer and fuck my computer. You know, it's like The computer is everything. It's all you need in this world A lot of these tracks speak about being isolated, being lonely in a very positive light, like it's good to be alone with your computer I also love how dynamic this song is. It feels very tactile. And I think that's another element of Feral Pop. in the digital sounds, you could feel the human hands touching it On London song, you could kind of hear the knobs on the DJ board being turned or the filters being messed with, especially as the song has this switch up towards the end where everything hits the accelerator. Whoa Stress. It's like, what if you turn the line occupied noise on a phone? I don't know. what do you call that? the like Beep beep beep when your call is blocked or something? Like what have you made that into a beat drop? We call that a busy signal. Thank you. As you can tell, I don't call people I call it Stress by Justice, the most stressful song ever made Another song that sounds like a fax machine Yes. Fax machine pop would be another approach we could go here, but no I think that Feral pop feels very appropriate. It is bringing out something is unrestrained, it's unguarded, it's very messy. Although funny enough, making this music, you know, all those little microim chops and drops like it's actually Highly thought out evenven though it its job is to just make us feel like w. Yeah, it's really technically sound. Maybe part of why it's connecting largely is because it feels like, as we've been talking about the utopic version of human and machine joining hands Rather than the dystopian future of AI and computer generated music To be feral is to be human Fs is divine So Nina for all these reasons, is the quintessential Feral pop artist Her music has a lot going on. It contains all the aspects of Feral Pop encapsulated in this one record. I love my computer. We have the IdDiM Dub steppy influence We have a meta and winking lyrical slant There's a whirlpool of genres all in even a single song And more than anything on this album, there's the devotion to technology and the fetish of computer culture. And people are really connecting with it. You know anecdotally, I saw her at Coachella this year. She was performing in the Sonora Tent, which is the smallest stage at the festival. There's a line that you need to wait in to get in. I was waiting in the longest line I had ever seen for that tent. I waited for like forty minutes to get in to see Nina Diraci, hundreds of people bitiding their time just to get a taste, a little hint of what it's like to see her perform. I get in, it's so sweaty. I'm standing shoulder to shoulder with people that were just going nuts. It's awesome stuff. It's super cool. I could see her really blowing up in the next few years. Based on everything we've heard today, I would not be surprised. As I said earlier, though, Nina's not the only important artist dipping into the waters of Feral Pop There's also the artists two hollest and underscores, latter of which we're going to talk about in our next episode, comoming at You Tmorrow. Switchump pop is produced byraana Cruz, edited by Liss Soap, engineered by Brand McFarland,illustrations by Hra Scotteb, V video by Nick Rripp, our teama song is by Zach Tonario and Jossie Adam of Archris, a member of the Vox Media podcast network and productuction ofulture