100 Gecs
10,000 Gecs

“The splendor of the world has been enriched with a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”

Dear Debaserioti friends who have bravely entered this page, you are surely wondering what the hell led you to read about a little-known group that makes deeply generational music. I don’t have an answer for you, but since you’re already here, I invite you to continue, and who knows, you might come out more enriched or more infuriated.

A bit of context: first of all, the quote that opens this review is not thrown in at random but identifies a constant in Gen Z’s consumption, namely speed. Pop products have had to bow to the attention deficits of the very young, corrupted by stimuli first offered by technology and secondly by social media, which promote ever more ephemeral content. A whirlwind of effervescent voracity that drives a frantic search for new things.

Speed that could not spare the film dimension (the binge-watching of serials, for example) and the musical one: a particular genre has translated this acrobatic hyperactivity, which critics have baptized "Hyperpop." Difficult to describe yet easy to identify, we could paraphrase it as a mad blender of punk, emo-core, electronic, Nu-metal, and rap with a distinctly pop flavor (thus a great ear for full melody and catchy choruses, as well as the ability to interpret a part of the everyday). All seasoned with a labor limae of post-production aimed at modifying and distorting the voice through vocoder and autotune, stripping it of its human component and speeding up the music itself. The result is a jagged sonic jungle that can’t help but daze the listener, confusing them with its rapid shifts in tone.

An intriguing formula, which will be pushed to extreme conditions by the group under review, namely the 100 Gecs, a U.S. duo formed in 2015 that, with their debut, delivered to posterity the cornerstone of this improbable and turbulent stylistic current. There is all the essence of hyperpop, but stressed to the limits of human knowledge.

Almost four years later, our musicians return with a new piece in their nascent saga, "10,000 Gecs": a noisy musical kaleidoscope of 10 tracks for 26 minutes of music that spans a variety of genres, from supercharged electronics to hyper-caloric adolescent pop-rock under the Speed of Blink-182, through the most demented rockabilly, sometimes with changes even in the same track. Noisy and thunderous, the album is a mad carousel that will drag you into a wild dimension of cyber claustrophobia. The prevailing nonsense of the lyrics and the sequence of sonic outbursts will make the already nebulous listening experience even more confusing.

Now, there are two ways to interpret this: the first is to see the intrinsic beauty of this work in its extreme chaos and the desperate attempt to find order in it, as if representing a small metaphor of the human experience, victim of the rampaging beast that is the universe. The second is simply to enjoy the moment, letting yourself be carried away, without necessarily finding a reason (and even here, the same metaphor can be invoked).

Gen Z has opted for the latter, leaving us "old folks" with the arduous task of deciphering this hallucinated Tower of Babel. And you, what do you think you'll do?