Joey Cash and the Hyperpop Renaissance
- Nicole Basham
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
** strobe warning for all music videos and concert footage
When hyperpop crashed into the mainstream music conversation and charts a few summers back, I was excited. As the months passed, the initial buzz became a sense of dread. What does it mean for something that began as a radical subversion of the limitations of industry standard pop to potentially be subsumed as a trend within it? What would happen to the beloved underground scene?
Rather than becoming iterative or disappearing, a new wave of electronic artists are making music on their own terms and proving how misguided my concerns were. Joey Cash is an ideal example of a hitmaker who maintains the technical precision of early PC Music while actively reckoning with the genre's evolution, straddling club and internet culture, and finding his own place within the aforementioned through immersive house and electroclash tracks. His debut album poser is catchy and bass-driven enough for a rave while maintaining a sense of reflectiveness, even meditativeness, that holds the listener's attention as the night wears on and long after the party's over.
I was thrilled to be able to listen to Joey Cash mix the tracks from poser live at 924 Gilman, a volunteer-run alternative music venue in North Berkeley that possesses the intimacy of a house party and a historical role in the 90s punk revival. The venue regularly platformed young local acts before they were signed, such as Green Day and Operation Ivy (later Rancid). The location felt appropriate to the current resurgence of hyperpop in an increasingly DIY and experimental electronic scene.
The night started with the first track on the album "joey fucking cash," an abrasive examination of self-identity. The song begins with a cacophony of voices saying his name that are abruptly wiped away in a wave of bass and heavy beats, replaced by a singular "joey fucking cash" at the very end, quite possibly in his own voice. Cash's team used a heavy fog effect on the stage, allowing projectors to beam bright colors and flashing strobes onstage while partially obscuring him as he manipulated the computer and thrashed alongside the crowd.
"swallow" was next on the setlist, which remains a definite favorite of mine. The cutting synth and bouncing beat helped to warm up the crowd. Hearing "run away" live was excellent because the maximalist song itself provides a space of escapism for the listener, whether digital or IRL, answering the repeated refrain "do you ever run away / to clear your head?" The choppy and all-consuming bass leaves no room for other thoughts amidst the waves of sound, but the synths maintain a sense of rhythm, fluidity, and evolution throughout the piece. Many of Cash's lyrically minimalist, circuitous songs remind me of when you repeat a word over and over and it becomes defamiliarized and takes on new emotional potential. Rather than seeming like he doesn't have much to say, the songs suggest there is too much to say that cannot be properly verbalized and must be communicated through sound alone.
"r u kissin any1?" was Joey Cash's first song to blow up and was instantly recognized by the audience. The playful, club-ready dubstep with an infectious beat and echoing refrain builds to a cascading perfection, making perfect sense for a breakout single. However, the music video for the song provides an uncanny representation of such a hit, featuring a girl dancing not in a bedroom or a club, but in a sort of eerie bunker before fading to pixelization and abstract technicolor graffiti.
"what do you want me to do?" has the aggressive and self-aware ethos of earlier hyperpop acts, such as 100 gecs, while still bringing a new attitude into the pre-existing scene. Cash's self-abasement in choosing the title poser and his consistent distortion of sounds and imagery portray an artist actively reckoning with what has preceded his debut and the demands of the industry surrounding him.
In the midst of the short, high-energy record, no other track is quite as surprising as "foetal." A faint, heartbeat-like bass line followed with soft synths creates a moment of reprieve and almost shocking calmness halfway through the record. The track could be seen as a moment of rebirth with a machine beeping and whirring in the background and indecipherable voices towards the end. The relative quiet makes the transition into the hardcore EDM "lose control" jarring and impactful.
The last lyrical track on the album is the looping "everything" which explores the dynamics of a strained-yet-essential relationship. The song begins as a conversation between Joey and Bella Athena, the female vocalist on several of his songs.
"I wanna see you / But you never have the time / I wanna show you / But you never have the drive / I wanna be there / And you’re showing up too late / I really shouldn’t / But I know you wanna stay"
The chorus involves both of them chanting "You and you and me and you" in an overlapping fashion, yet it is hard to tell whether the track (or the album, for that matter) ends on a positive or negative note.
While I love the album as a whole, the instrumental tracks "i want to set your house on fire," "new low," and "1,652 days" that end the album are where poser best explores its point of view and introduces new sounds that are less reflective of a club scene and function more as engrossing extensions of the artists' headspace and emotional life. Keeping with the cover art, which looks like a Rorschach test met an acid test, the songs seem to reflect the listener's own headspace back to oneself.
At a time when new acts like underscores, Tiffany Day, and Frost Children are dominating discussion around the revived hyperpop scene, Joey Cash proves with poser that he deserves to be a part of the conversation. He just announced a second leg of his tour with tickets available still on his website, and I would definitely recommend getting out to hear the album on a professional sound system (and to support a young artist at a local venue!) While the album explores and engages with digital culture, seeing it with a highly-engaged audience really helped bring out the sense of liveness inherent in the work.
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