In the seven years since Laura Les and Dylan Brady first released music as 100 gecs, they’ve been elevated to the patron saints of hyperpop: musically chaotic and poly-gluttonous, profoundly specific and yet totally random, ideal vessels of the 21st-century’s post-pastiche pop culture. Theirs is the sound of a zillion infostreams from the depths of your social feeds shooting into your eyes at once, both poisoned by irony and aware that if you follow irony into its own ouroboros, you will discover the antidote.
As dirtbag omnivores with identical peroxide dye jobs, they’ve been deified by the Discord masses, valiantly representing the depressive, blue-collar, white, queer kids alienated by their small towns for being “freaks.” In the video for 10,000 gecs’ pop-punk lead single “Hollywood Baby,” the lyric “at the crib goin’ crazy” is visualized by Les and Brady lighting fireworks in the kind of shitty house you might rent on the cheap when you’re 23—it’s busted and the toilet probably doesn’t work, but you love it because it’s yours. A few decades ago, a person feeling ostracized in their hometown might have just moved to barely-affordable cities like New York or the Bay. Now they can delve into the warm crevasses of the weird internet, to see and be seen and indulge every impulse.
With 10,000 gecs, Les and Brady have the unenviable task of translating their chaotic hyperpop to a major label, all while pickling their madcap sound experiments just enough to evolve. Underlying this is the fact that they are big-ass music nerds, virtuosic, even—the kind who could have been studio academics with Berklee degrees if they’d made a different choice in the multiverse. 10,000 gecs telegraphs that their potentially larger ambitions—a chart hit in the footsteps of Sum 41, say—may not fundamentally change their ethos, but it has furthered their interest in thrash guitars, ska revival, and pop-punk that generally sounds quantum-leaped in from a turn-of-the-century Hot Topic. You thought you loved computer glitch but, my friends, have you met slap bass?
Opening song “Dumbest Girl Alive” is 10,000 gecs’ big statement piece, turbo-charged with thrash metal riffs and stoned sub-bass, and it dunk-tanks us into what we’re in for. Les, snarling from a depressive perch, frames proper phone etiquette as a mortal threat (“Yeah, I’ll fuckin text you back!”) and shouts out plastic surgery (“I did science on my face”), but also gives us a decent thesis for gecs’ whole thing: “I’m smarter than I look/I’m the dumbest girl alive.” It’s a deceptive anthem, in that it’s so stupid and fun but also melancholy and self-denigrating, with a request to “put emojis on my grave.” It’s followed by a more traditional gecs number, “757,” glimmering with technicolor glitch and further chagrin, as Les voices a conflicted internal monologue: “I’m dumb and hypocritical/I’m taking things too literal/When it was hypothetical.”
