By Tara
i implore you to listen to each song i mention in this piece, but it’s okay if you don’t too. just have a re-listen to SOPHIE’s Immaterial. that’s enough.
I am crying in the Cowley Road Tesco Express, Aisle 6, next to the Cadbury hot chocolate sachets. It’s a grey weekday afternoon under fluorescent lights, and I’m supposed to be grabbing a comfort drink. Instead, I’m choking back tears while Food House’s ‘everybody’s eyes’ plays through my earbuds. Fraxiom’s vocals echo in my head:
“I look into everybody’s eyes One by one, one at a time And it makes me wanna cry Because I’ve never felt a love exactly like this in my life… One by one, you saved my life You could say I saved your life But don’t treat me like I am special because you also saved mine It goes both ways all the time.”
By the time she hits the line about mutual salvation, I am gone. Hyperpop has me openly weeping between instant coffee and herbal tea. I probably look absurd (crying in public to a song most shoppers have never heard of and would likely hate), and yet in that absurdity, I think, lies something real. The moment is painfully sincere, even if the music blaring in my ears is the kind of autotuned, up-tempo internet pop many still dismiss as irony or satire – an attack on so-called ‘real music’.I stand there, stupidly, frozen, crying quietly, suddenly overwhelmed by something at once intimate, universal, and deeply embarrassing.
This scene might read as a joke, or something I made up for this introduction (a memeable image of a transgender 20-year-old’s angst) but it didn’t feel like a joke to me. It felt like the punchline had, all of a sudden, punched me in the gut. Hyperpop is often a genre tagged as tongue-in-cheek or ‘post-ironic’, and in that moment it had just cut straight through my soul.
Traditionally, hyperpop wears a big, goofy smile. Yet here we are, tears in our eyes. So, what changed? Did anything change at all?
I don’t think this sincerity is a new phenomenon. Maybe it’s easier to notice. It’s not just Food House. underscores’ ‘fishmonger’ and ‘boneyard aka fearmonger’ are dripping with earnest introspection. Listen to ‘Girls and boys’. Listen to the beat. And then read the lyrics. This is a trans woman wondering if she will be relegated not only to quasi-womanhood, but also quasi-manhood her entire life. Will she ever be able to embody a “girl”?
Hyperpop is queer. Hyperpop is trans. And I don’t just mean the people making it are queer and trans (though so, so many of them are), but because something about hyperpop’s very form and texture feels deeply, fundamentally queer. Queerness, in a cis, heteronormative society, is glitchy, distorted, modulated; something that breaks norms not by accident, but by necessity. Transness especially. And femininity even more so.
Hyperpop, I think and can’t stop thinking about, is full of transfem artists because being a trans woman is itself an experimental project under capitalism. There’s no roadmap for femininity, not a real one anyway. There are a million different ways you’re supposed to fail at it. Cis women do it all the time. Femininity isn’t something you’re meant to succeed in, it’s something you’re constructed to chase endlessly, something designed to dissolve the moment you reach for it. Femininity, especially transfeminine experience, feels more like trying to build the plane while you’re flying it. It’s messy, precarious, terrifying, and there’s no guarantee it won’t collapse mid-flight.
That precarity – that experimental, experiential desperation – is exactly what hyperpop sounds like. It is not accidental that so many transfem artists have gravitated towards it: underscores, Jane Remover, Laura Les, SOPHIE, Arca, Black Dresses, and so many others. These artists are trying to articulate the impossible task of femininity, of transness, of making sense of a self that capitalism keeps dissolving.
Laura Les’ screaming into a mic, pitching her voice up to a desperate digital shriek, is not irony for irony’s sake: it’s a tangible manifestation of dysphoria and the pain of navigating a body that capitalism and patriarchy don’t know what to do with. When SOPHIE twisted pop music into strange and luminous shapes, she was creating her own soundscape under which that was possible – that was not just experimentation. It was, I think, and I am prone to affective fallacy perhaps, an attempt to reach something beyond binaries, beyond traditional forms. Hyperpop is not just queerness as disruption, it’s queerness as beauty, queerness as self-creation in real time.
Sure, hyperpop is ironic, absurd, satirical – but that’s a protective layer. It’s a shield, an emotional buffer between artist and audience. Irony is safe because sincerity, especially for transfem artists, queer artists, is inherently dangerous. Sincerity is vulnerability, and vulnerability invites violence. Irony lets you test sincerity, lets it leak out gently, carefully, like a fragile secret. Irony doesn’t attempt to negate sincerity; it safeguards it, amplifies it. It’s sincerity’s greatest advocate, precisely by pretending not to be.
Because femininity under capitalism isn’t meant to be sincere. It’s meant to be decorative, performative, and transient. To be sincere in femininity, especially as a trans woman, is to insist upon your reality, your coherence, your worthiness in a world designed to strip you of those things. Hyperpop helps create it, precisely by revelling in incoherence. It takes incoherence and says, “Yes, that’s mine. Yes, this is what my identity feels like. No, I won’t clarify and no, you don’t need to understand.” It’s why the music sounds the way it does. Queerness is the glitch here, femininity the distortion.
‘Everybody’s eyes’ was the song that made me cry in front of the hot chocolate. Fraxiom sings:
“Come on man, just call me your daughter for the hell of it
I would go so far as to call all the past irrelevant
All I need is just one sign
I heard you call Twitter X
I’ve been trans for longer than that, and I still don’t get respect."
In those few lines, everything snaps into painful clarity. It is not irony. It’s desperation hidden in an upbeat melody, vulnerability made to be danceable. We dance to this sorrow. We mosh to it. To dysphoria, to isolation, the strange grief of knowing someone who might love you might never really see you. It’s the simplest trans narrative, encapsulating that universal trans ache: the hope for acceptance, however fleeting, however conditional. Fraxiom is not hiding here. There’s no mask, no exaggeration, just naked sincerity and autotune.
Maybe that’s why it resonates so deeply with me. Interestingly, though, it also resonates with my cis friends and allies, who remain deeply committed to understanding and supporting us. Because sincerity is universal in its intimacy, and emotional honesty knows no boundaries other than those we impose ourselves. I hear Fraxiom’s voice tremble on the line about being called her father’s “daughter”, and I feel it reverberate somewhere deep in my chest, the ache of never fully being known or loved as you need to be. Isn’t that all of us, in the end? Isn’t that why hyperpop continues to move us, beyond meme culture, beyond digital absurdity, beyond irony?
It’s all sincerity, actually. It always was.
Hyperpop has always been sincere. It had to be. It offers something deeply real and honest, a lifeline for people desperate to hear themselves, not in spite of the irony, but because of it. It refuses to package femininity, transness, queerness into something easily marketable. Instead, it explodes those categories, redefines them, celebrates them as the awesome things they are rather than the things they ought to be.
That’s why I stood in public, tears streaming down my face when Frax sang that she’s “never felt a love exactly like this in my life”. Because that love isn’t simple, it’s not comfortable or neat; it’s messy and complicated and cringy and sincere and ugly sometimes. But it’s real. It’s the kind of love that makes you, makes me cry in public next to the eggs and instant coffee, because for a moment you feel, I feel seen.
If sincerity in hyperpop surprises us, maybe we weren’t really listening. Maybe we never heard SOPHIE when she told us, gently, beautifully, “I’m real when I shop my face” in ‘Faceshopping’. Maybe it’s time we start believing her. Maybe hyperpop was trying to tell us that sincerity isn’t something you find by stripping away irony. It’s something that bleeds through it, no matter how you try to hide it.
Maybe that’s exactly how we find ourselves: real, vulnerable, human, and sincerely, hopelessly alive.