If you're the type to take pleasure in connecting dots across the overwhelmingly scattered trends of 2010s digital music culture, then 100 gecs are right up your alley. Production and songwriting duo Dylan Brady and Laura Les—hailing from Los Angeles and Chicago, respectively—make abrasive, maximalist pop music that isn’t so much indefinable as it is endlessly identifiable, cross-sectioning myriad mainstream-leaning and definitively underground music released over the last decade. Nothing they’re doing is new, per se, but the way in which they do it feels fresh and appealingly unique.
PC Music’s arch, conceptualist cyber-pop is an easy reference point, as are the crunchy, compressed headbangers that Sleigh Bells pumped out in their prime; at times, 100 gecs sound like Visible Cloaks producing for Charli XCX (fittingly, Brady’s already turned in an official remix for the latter’s Lizzo-assisted single “Blame It on Your Love”). The duo’s most defiantly ear-bleeding moments recall the bass-shaking abrasions of XXXTentacion’s “Look at Me!”—but they also bring a sense of cocked-eyebrow playfulness shared with storied Swedish indie label Sincerely Yours, especially the dearly missed Situationist pop act the Tough Alliance. If that sounds like a lot, wait until you get a load of 1000 gecs, one of the year's most fascinating, exhilarating experimental pop albums.
There’s no better title for this thing than 1000 gecs, which references both the group’s charming self-titled 2017 debut and their sheer multiple-atop-multiple audaciousness. The album’s singles to date—the pulsing, cavity-inducing “Money Machine” and “800db Cloud”’s drop-dotted miserabilia—both conclude in washes of coruscating noise and death-metal thrashing; “I Need Help Immediately” is a sounds-of-the-studio collage in which the most recognizable melodic line sounds like an inverted McDonald’s jingle. The style and attitude of hip-hop is pervasive, but that barely encapsulates 100 gecs’ wild-eyed genre mishmash, which covers chiptuned pop-punk, chintzy trance synths, and the closely mic’d intimacy of indie pop—sometimes all in the same song.
Brady and Les are musical fabulists, but 1000 gecs surprisingly rewards close listening when it comes to lyrical content, too. Though the opening line of “Money Machine”—“Hey, you lil’ piss baby”—scans as pure chest-puffing braggadocio, it also contains one of the most appealingly strange taunts in recent memory: “You talk a lotta big game/For someone with such a small truck.” “Stupid Horse” is the catchiest song about the dangers of racetrack betting since the Hold Steady’s “Chips Ahoy!,” doubling as a hilarious evocation of financial hedonism and a touching tale of animal liberation. “Ringtone,” 1000 gecs’ clearest-eyed selection, details intimacy in the age of group chats before its sweet sentiment curdles like milk left out on the counter: “Used to love that ringtone when you called me/Now it makes me sick.”
1000 gecs saw release in May on Brady’s Dog Show label, and the duo is currently affiliated with Diplo’s always-trending Mad Decent imprint as well. But they’re not for everyone, and that might be an understatement. Brady and Les’ ability to turn on various sonic and thematic dimes—to describe a loving exchange between two long-distance paramours one minute and brag about being addicted to Monster Energy drinks the next—can be disorienting. Even at their most accessible, 100 gecs sound like a bunch of fireworks stuffed into a fax machine, or human beings singing in the key of dial-up. They traffic in pure and uncut absurdity, but even their most outrageous moments radiate a strange sincerity—the kind that could only come from two denizens of a perpetually logged-on generation.
