It’s halfway through 2024. 100 gecs has come back and gone again, 90s ska-revival silliness and all. A.G. Cook learned guitar and made a soft rock album, before going back to his IDM roots. Jane Remover released a really good drone record last year, and Charli XCX is in the midst of a hard pivot to club EDM. The post-hyperpop exodus is complete, and in the midst of it all sits our Independent Artist of the Week, internet-based, Perth-residing artist To Oscar.

“I was like a lot of those early internet kids, watching Skrillex live videos and stuff.”

To Oscar is truly a child of the internet. Inspired by the euphoric chaos of late 2000s dubstep, he built his musical world online, connecting with like minded artists via platforms like Discord and Twitter. In 2021 he was part of the 20+ member hyperpop band / internet collective webcage’s debut album as a founding member. A promo video recorded on Discord from the time features band members celebrating the inexplicable success of the project: “none of this should have worked at all. The project shouldn’t sound as cohesive as it does.”

But the album sounds great, characterised more by its lucky-dip approach to genre and style than any one sound. Hyperpop was never a genre in and of itself, but rather a realisation of an approach to making music that had been developing since October 1, 2014, when Skrillex’s set at Red Rocks was uploaded to youtube dot com. Seeing it and so much more via the largest and most diverse source of information in history, To Oscar’s approach to music is boundless. His newer releases effortlessly incorporate emo, dub, EDM, nu-metal, garage punk, and cloud rap, whipping conventions and signifiers of each into a blend that I guess one could consider truly “pop” music. His tracks have definitely evolved over the years, but all of them carry the mark of the everything-all-at-once-machine of pastiche that is the internet. It has profoundly shaped the way gen z artists like To Oscar approach music: cognisant of everything there is no reason to be bound by anything, and thus sound moves beyond genre into hypertextuality.

“It’s not actually… that wasn’t a photo. Like, that’s very edited and kind of photoshopped.”

Take for example, the cover art of To Oscar’s latest single ‘Dash Cam’. It’s a composite creation of several different images, including a screenshot of a sunrise from a 2009 episode of Breaking Bad. Or the song’s visualiser, three minutes and 54 seconds of footage of an air freshener designed by and featuring the face of an owner of a random Perth-based grocery store. Snapshots into the localised emotions of a hyper-online life.

“The air freshener is not mine, that was my girlfriend’s. And she has this other air freshener of Meg Griffin, but as a fish, I think. I was going to use that, but then I was like, that’s too kind of meme-y.”

It’s halfway through 2024 and hyperpop is dead but the underlying ethos of the movement is still strong. Meaning stays relative and context is everything but now emotions ring truer than ever; on the internet, and in To Oscar’s music too. Narrative and heart permeate his art just as much as irony, even more so as he’s matured.

“I think [something I’m proud of] is being comfortable singing and stuff. When I first started I wouldn’t even, like, sing along to songs. I didn’t even know what my singing voice sounded like. It was just such a big leap for me to kind of learn how to do that.”

Listen back to the full interview with our Independent Artist of the Week To Oscar on Up For It with Ify & Benny above. Stream his latest song ‘Dash Cam’ below.