[Commlist] Special Issue "hyperpop's hyperlinks" on the Popular Music journal

‘what is hyperpop?’, asked Charli XCX back in 2020 on Twitter.

This special of Popular Music will contemplate this question while 
investigating how and to whom the genre matters. Hyperpop’s roots are 
often traced back to the UK-based PC Music label in the mid-2010s, but 
equally important are the online communities active on platforms such as 
Discord, Twitter, and Soundcloud which were later recognised and 
amplified by Spotify’s ‘Hyperpop’ playlist, started in 2019 
(Dandridge-Lemco 2020).

In crude terms, hyperpop is a complex phenomenon that demands renewed 
attention to both longstanding and ‘trending’ issues in popular music 
studies. Because hyperpop is defined by web-based entanglement and 
multiplicity, the phenomenon necessitates a wide range of critical 
approaches, theoretical frameworks, and empirical methodologies. With 
this special issue we aim to explore the sonic, visual, sociocultural, 
and political dimensions of a phenomenon that has already left a 
distinctive imprint on both young fans and mainstream popular culture as 
a whole. Arguably, hyperpop has been one of the most significant 
developments in the history of popular music since the turn of the 
millennium, and we invite a broad range of submissions from early career 
researchers, independent scholars, and established professors, either in 
traditional feature article format or as written-out roundtable 
discussions on a specific theme. Potential topics may include (but are 
not limited to):

– Hyperpop-centred interventions in longstanding debates about popular 
music and its theorisation.
– Reflections on the strengths and limitations of genre theory in music 
studies from an internet studies perspective, or critical perspectives 
on the role of streaming services such as Spotify in the consolidation 
of hyperpop.
– Critical perspectives on the political economy of hyperpop and its 
monetization in the age of platform capitalism.
– Interdisciplinary perspectives on hyperpop’s playful audiovisual 
aesthetics and/or (post-)irony.
– (Hyper)links with earlier moments in popular music history, including 
echoes from prog, glam, punk, New Romantic synth pop, pop punk, early 
rave music, and so on;  archival and/or institutional histories of the 
PC Music label; the posthumous legacy of SOPHIE; 1990s / 2000s 
nostalgia, anemoia, and post-internet retrofuturism.
– Emic and etic perspectives on: hyperpop as a musical coping mechanism 
among ‘born digital’ members of Gen-Z; on the idea of hyperpop as the 
sonification of queerness and/or nonbinary gender identity.
– Intersectional analysis of hyperpop, race, queerness, and 
techno-orientalism.

Please submit your paper proposal (c.300 words) by email to 
(hyperpopspecialissue /at/ gmail.com) by 15 June 2026. Following review, 
selected articles will be commissioned in July 2026. We hope to have 
full articles submitted in December 2026, with final materials uploaded 
to ScholarOne in April 2027. No fee is required from the authors.

If you require more information, please email the co-editors directly:

Karina Moritzen Barbosa (Universidade Federal Fluminense & Universität 
Oldenburg)
(karina.moritzen /at/ uni-oldenburg.de)
Michiel Kamp (Universiteit Utrecht)
(M.Kamp1 /at/ uu.nl)
Ed Katrak Spencer (Universiteit Utrecht)
(e.c.k.spencer /at/ uu.nl)
Chananja Clement (Universiteit Utrecht)
(chananjaclement /at/ hotmail.com)

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