In January 2022 I found myself a bit all over the place. Two years of CoViD had been ground out and we were staring down the barrel of a dark and wet and lonely winter. I started a photo project around the time which focused on condensing some of these feelings I had, on standing still in a world and a life that seemed to be marching inexorably onwards around me with little to show for the time. I ended up going back into therapy later in the year for depression, unable to shake myself out of the fugues on my own, and although it didn’t (of course) magically resolve all my problems it did give me more tools to manage the thoughts and I ended up coming to terms with it.
About that time I started to listen to a lot of hyperpop: I’d always had it as a fringe interest through the PC Music movement but it kind of entered inside my event horizon whilst doing some exercising and walking and quickly took over the majority of my music for a good while. Looking back at the last few years, recognising that Ambient and Drone listening habits for me personally have somewhat fallen away, I realised that a lot of this had to do with the persistence of those ruminant thoughts: reflective, contemplative airs can be a good thing in moderation but in lockdown, when all one has is time, and in the midst of a politically draining world such as ours, distractions can often become more essential for mental self-protection.
I’ve probably fucked myself to some degree in the last three years, at the very least slowed down beneficial coping strategies by allowing myself to all too quickly come back to these short, snappy, brash, loud, dopamine stimulating tunes rather than let my brain rest, float, feel. Unfortunately it’s always easier to just bury your head than it is to confront something head on and I can probably blame some of this on being introduced to Yung Skrrt through Half Words 3.
Reverse one step: that’s not an indictment on either Skrrt’s album or his musical style more generally (or the abstract “hyperpop” more broadly, even if there is an interesting sociological discussion on zeitgeist and the advent of genre around that). Indeed, it’s hard to know what Half Words 3 is even strictly about, if anything,. Frequency filters, dirty basslines, judicious autotune and reversed loops (a Skrrt staple) all made live on Twitch, subvert (horrible word) notions of normal Pop. Or normal song expectations at all really.
Half-rhymes populate the smothered verses when the mumble and smearing and autotune permits some glimpse of language through the heady loops and their dirty mastering, and few of them make coherent sense even within themselves let alone a part of any assumed whole.
“kissing dad on the lips one more time, I can see you run away” “tell me you know about things that I’ve never seen, never gonna know cos you never dream…shattering your dreams is not in me” – 4get ab7 1t
“I feel fine…tip top tipped up to the club…never seen you all the way, never stop…drying tears on my lap…never had you call me on a week day…I can’t work from my phone so don’t sue me” – Blind Memory
“don’t know what you meant…shine a light…try to catch me, you can’t catch me” – Can’t Catch Me
Watching Skrrt’s process during his livestreams reveals some insight: beats are quickly brought together and assembled to play with the flow, an entirely ~~vibes~~ based process where lyrical coherence is less important than maintaining some sense of energy or feel of a piece. Considering how fast most of these come together it’s actually pretty impressive how good many of them are, but “Half Words” is a pretty apt term as it turns out: stream of consciousness free form somethings that exist right on the edge of sensibility.
TIUOTIF:HW3FM is so weird to me because it’s far from my favourite record ever but it’s had one of the most disproportionate impacts on my music listening habits in recent years. “Blind Memory” has legitimately become my most played track of all time according to my last.fm stats and I have no explanation for why this music or that piece in particular does it for me but I don’t care. It’s one of those staples for me now that just smothers my brain in its bite-sized nonsense candies and I briefly can’t hear myself think to suffer the world.