You probably were if you were into hyperpop, at least. For everyone who partook in those virtual Zoom concerts and massive Discord-server conversations, hyperpop felt like the center of the world: a new musical scene that truly felt like the future, constructing and contorting and redefining itself in real time for thousands of young netizens stuck in their rooms.
Experimental-rap artiste Danny Brown was just as enthralled by the movement as the rest of us. And while it didn’t take long for the organic movement to splinter into a million pieces post-COVID, leaving the genre-spanning “hyperpop diaspora” in its wake, Brown’s interest in the scene didn’t die with the lockdowns. He’s been teasing a hyperpop-adjacent album for years, putting out one-off singles with a gaggle of internet-music superstars throughout the 2020s and talking excitedly about his continued interest in the genre. All of that hype has culminated in 2025’s Stardust, an album that – just as promised – tilts unabashedly into the diaspora and its diverse array of sounds.
“For me, it was really about having fun making music again,” he said in an interview with Ringtone Magazine late last year about the making of Stardust. “For years my songs dealt with depression and my mental health, so now that I’m sober I focus more on the positives and just being a fan of the scene. I feel so honored that I’m able to work with them.”
On this album, Danny Brown’s reverence of that movement is
palpable; as a result, he mostly steps back and lets his featured
artists take the creative lead. Across some parts of Stardust,
that decision makes for some of the most thrilling rap music in recent
memory. Brown, however, largely spends this album exploring rather than
refining this expansive stylistic palette, leading to a project that’s
just as imaginative as it is disjointed. After over a decade in the
spotlight, Brown himself clearly isn’t done creating: arguably, he’s at
his peak, writing and rapping as dynamically and introspectively as
ever. Stardust is a beautiful character piece of recovery and hard-fought joy. But it’s so chock-full of inspiration that it drowns in it.
In some ways, there’s an ocean of distance between the hyperpop movement and Danny Brown: Brown’s breakout mixtape XXX
dropped when most of these artists were in grade school, and some are
barely even old enough to drink now. But he’s been known to work with
the boundary pushers of electronic music, from Purity Ring to The
Avalanches to Kelela, not to mention his bombastic, EDM-infused 2023
collab album with JPEGMAFIA. On Stardust, he seems to take
particular inspiration from this newest generation of innovators – this
album’s feature list is a who’s-who of the best post-hyperpop artists
who are still doing it.
However, while these featured
artists hail from the same chronically-online scene, their styles are
anything but alike. Hyperpop itself was inspired by so many disparate
influences that, even at its prime, it could barely be corralled into a
single category; as the movement died, adjacent artists went on to make
everything from bright electropop to heavy shoegaze to turbocharged rap
music. The result of putting much of that entire umbrella on one album
is janky, to say the least: Stardust jolts rapidly from
Quadeca’s dense, artsy folktronica to Cynthoni’s depressive, expansive
drum-and-bass atmospheres to Underscores’s cheeky and nostalgic
synthpop. It’s a clash of genres so dramatic that the album often feels
more like a compilation of Danny Brown features than a cohesive product.
While the music isn’t consistent, though, Brown himself usually is. He has called Stardust
an album of healing: it’s the first project he’s made fully sober, and
his writing largely lingers on that process of recovery. He’s always
been self-reflective about his issues with substance abuse, but here he
raps about the same in the past tense. On the opener, “Book of Daniel,”
he says: “Sleepin’ real good at night ‘cause I’m proud of myself / Say a
prayer when I wake up because that rehab helped”. On the closer,
“All4U,” he raps: “when I’m on stage, I look at your face, knowing each
one is a gift from grace”.
That’s only some of the album, though. When he’s not
reflecting on his past, he’s as loose as we’ve seen him – bragging,
dropping self-help-esque motivational one-liners, writing bars like “my
bitch be thick like Mewtwo” and “punchlines weak like putting water in
ketchup”. In these moments, you can tell just how fun this album was to
make. During the introspective tracks, you can tell just how cathartic
it was. And through every moment of the album, braggadocious or somber,
Brown’s performances permeate pure hope. He always sounds inspired,
appreciative of what he’s survived, stoked to be making an album this
creatively unbounded.
Hyperpop served that same purpose for a lot of artists
during its peak. It was also an escape and a celebration, exhilarating
and contemplative, with musicians writing saccharine and joyful and
exaggerated and often-satirical pop music amidst the worst year in all
of our lives. At the core of the movement and all those conflicting
feelings was always a sense of freedom, the feeling that being
behind a microphone or a DAW allowed you to do whatever you want, to
become whoever you wanted to be, even if the rest of the world continued
to be on fire around you. That unrestrained creativity and resilience
is on display through all of Stardust, strengthened by Brown’s
obvious excitement to just be making this album, to be free from
addiction and depression, to be happier than ever. But it’s so
unrestrained that it sometimes loses its grip, condensing several albums
worth of ideas into a single project that isn’t quite as compelling as
the sum of its parts, the sum of its collaborators, or the sum of its
energy.
