The super saturated, mass consumerist culture of late capitalist America is no new concept for electronic music. Its neon drenched aesthetics and inherent overstimulation are always ripe for picking. Perhaps most prominent as a major influence on the aesthetics and direction of hyperpop, it was embraced as an allegory for pop itself by SOPHIE circa-2012. Hudson Mohawke, the moniker of Ross Birchard, is not a name immediately synonymous with the hyperpop movement or its PC Music roots, but if you listen closely to the Scottish producer’s catalogue you’ll find the blueprint for acts like Umru or 1000 Gecs in the DNA of his sound. It’s a sound he’s been pioneering since 2009, pre-dating PC Music’s come up by about three years. His album Butter, released in 2009, sounded alarmingly ahead of its time. Its saccharine, helium light production tore up the conventions of then hip-hop, while its abrupt style pivots broke the conventions of genre. And though Birchard never quite associated Hudson Mohawke with pop, assimilating instead into the glitch-hop and wonky scenes, Butter felt accessible to the casual listener in a way that his peers weren’t. It felt pop. And it felt lightyears in the future. Still, his thematic concerns differed from those who would go on to evolve the approach into hyperpop. He was less concerned with theoretical concept, instead allowing himself “to just fuck around… without the pressure of ‘I have to make a hit today’, or ‘I have to make something that works on a massive festival stage.” On Cry Sugar, his first album in seven years, he’s done fucking around. Directly informed by living in LA and what he calls “American decadence” and “the quintessential backdrop of late capitalism,” Cry Sugar acknowledges the hyperpop manifesto but doesn’t so much embrace it rather than blow it up altogether.
Notably Birchard is embracing pop more than ever before; perhaps unavoidable, given the album’s thematic concerns. On Dance Forever, he builds a mutant Timbaland hip-hop beat around an earworm vocal hook, accented with rave synths and the sound of power drills. Come A Little Closer sounds like an intensification of the sort of pop 3OH3! and Owl City championed back in their heyday. There’s Kanye West all over Redeem. Similarly, he places soulful R&B and gospel vocals at the centre of Intentions and Behold, the latter closely resembling the farcical pop monstrosities of SOPHIE in the vein of Immaterial while elsewhere, Lonely Days and Stump owe much to the longform soundscapes on Oil Of Every Person’s Uninsides. This pivot toward pop and R&B tropes isn’t exactly new for Birchard. He began embracing vocals and hooks more vehemently on 2015’s Lantern, though on that album he eschewed jagged, futurist production for something more straightforward. The culmination of combining his newfound pop sensibilities with his erratic glitch instincts produces something new in the scope of Hudson Mohawke, but also something that sounds all too familiar in a post-hyperpop climate. This is not to assume that Birchard set out to create a hyperpop album, per se, but what he arrives at on Cry Sugar is alarmingly close to where PC Music was a few years back, and where 100 Gecs are just in front of. There are still some moments of freshness. Bow in particular sounds like something A.G. Cook and Pharrell Williams might cook up together should they ever cross paths, a neo-funk song set to industrial glitch-hop. But overall, there’s a sense that Birchard is less concerned with the future than he is with the present.
Download and stream Cry Sugar here
In this sense, Cry Sugar triumphs in capturing the wide-eyed, panic attack inducing onslaught of American consumerism and mass media. Like SOPHIE before him, the objective distance of not actually being American allows Birchard to create some poignant statements. The bright and optimistic keys of Is It Supposed recalls the jingles of every sunlit, family filled advertisement ever, or the opening tune of a morning news show. That Birchard should extend this into a full, ceaseless six minutes is stomach turning, and brilliant. Juxtaposed with the spirited gospel of tracks like Redeem, Some Buzz, or Intentions, it makes for a jarring experience.
Each piece of Cry Sugar swings from one extreme to the next, echoing the absurdity of American life. The tracks here play on different facets of this life and culture, and the alarming disparities between groups of its population. This makes the album work best as a whole. It’s a work of overwhelming maximalism, a vast pastiche of trash, pop, and consumerist cultures. A megamix uploaded to promote the album condenses its nineteen tracks into a five and a half minute absurdist pop pastiche. It’s set to an over-saturated video featuring mutant 3D animations of dystopian landscapes, humanoid bald eagles, a jacked Donald Duck, Johnny Depp, and the Teletubbies sun baby. Within those five and a half minutes, the entirety of Cry Sugar is put into focus, like popping an Adderall. Honestly, Adderall may be a good idea when approaching this album. Cry Suagr is a bloated, gonzo, oft grotesque mindfuck, and easily the most utterly fascinating work Hudson Mohawke has made to date.
Watch the Cry Sugar megamix below.
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