The logic of today’s pop culture is lore, and the keepers of the lore are the fandoms. As recently observed in the Swiftieverse, the stans cannot live on songs alone—they demand worldbuilding. They shall have Easter eggs. They will make video essays about whether or not Harry Styles wears a wig. These are ideal conditions for A. G. Cook, the producer and persona at the heart of the PC Music universe. His third solo full-length is a dizzying concept album that spills over into animated videos, bespoke websites, and several millennia’s worth of made-up lore. Appearing in the midst of the megawatt rollout for Brat, the Charli XCX album on which Cook returns as a lead producer, Britpop was never going to be the biggest pop album of the year as measured by social clout—but it just might be the biggest by volume.
As his first album since the end of PC Music, the era-defining experimental pop label that ceased releasing new music last year after a decade, Britpop follows 2020’s seven-disc solo sprawl 7G and its rapid sequel, the dense and ambitious Apple. This time around he’s kept a lid on things—it’s a comparatively tight triple album, eight tracks per disc, arranged along the themes of past, present, and future (a classic tarot spread, not coincidentally). It’s also a sprawling multimedia project complete with characters, timelines, online games, videos, and bonus downloads accessed via three familiar-looking websites: Wandcamp, Wheatport, and Witchfork. (All three were recently “acquired by an undisclosed multidimensional conglomerate,” according to a pop-up.)
In a way, the PC Music enterprise was always about making websites, as Cook—a computer nerd before he became a musician—explained to DIY back in 2014. While a complete hermeneutics of the Cookverse is beyond the scope of an album review (and would spoil the quest) the video for “Soulbreaker” might be the place to start: a time-traveling animation by Gustaf Holtenäs that’s stuffed with lore to be decoded by the faithful of the PC Music subreddit.
Britpop begins in the Past, with the first disc a kind of epitaph to PC Music’s now-classic sound, a shiny playground of boing-splat colors and neon noise. It sounds like Cook is tying up loose ends, perhaps emptying the archives. There are mallow-soft synths and stinging trance supersaws, hairsprayed ’80s syndrums and speedy riffs recalling the “impossible music” of early influence Conlon Nancarrow. Hyper-chopped helium vocals appear in various states of disarray, from Charli XCX trilling “Brit-brit-brit like Britpop” on the title track to the shattered verbiage of “Prismatic.” The third disc is on similar ground musically but with a few more solidly structured songs and, on “Butterfly Craft,” a very un-PC excursion into cable-tangled radiophonic noise.
The Past and Future discs will appeal directly to PC heads, with few big surprises. Even at peak intensity—the speedrun finish of “Prismatic,” the restless mechanics of “Luddite Factory Operator”—Cook’s surfaces are varnished, his structures both effortless and complex. There’s none of the naivety or pleasingly “wrong” tilt of those remarkable early productions, like GFOTY’s “Bobby” or Hannah Diamond’s “Pink and Blue.” This is the work of an accomplished, L.A.-facing pop producer. When Charli enters the room—as she also does on “Lucifer,” a catchy, moody-girl highlight also featuring Addison Rae—the scene comes alive, while the tracks that rest on ultra-processed, unintelligible vocals, like the Balearic “Crescent Sun,” take on the weightless quality of a hologram.
Which is why the Present disc, where Cook takes the mic, is the surprise standout of the three. Picking up where Apple left off, these eight songs also take their cue from Thy Slaughter’s Soft Rock—Cook’s witty collaboration with PC Music oldtimer easyFun—to drive deeper into digitally enhanced fuzz rock. Infused with the wistful melancholy that British comedian Bill Bailey once identified in his countryfolk (because “52 percent of our days are overcast”) the Present disc falls somewhere between cultish bedroom-punk (The Durutti Column, Felt) and scratchy ’90s indie (Teenage Fanclub, the Breeders, late ’90s Blur)—and delivers some sweet, sweet guitar tones to boot. Our troubadour gets close to the mic, using telephone effects and Auto-Tune to boost the grain of his far-from-powerful voice, while the guitars do quiet-quiet-LOUD grunge dynamics (“Green Man,” “Greatly”) and wailing mini-solos (“Nice to Meet You”). Most addictive is “Bewitched,” an egg punk anthem for the children of Weezer and Ash, iced with a perfect hook (“I heard her say, Abra-abracadabra”) that echoes an oldie by Ian Dury.
Buried inside the lyrics is a sense of distance and loss, from the awkwardly British (“I’ll miss you greatly”) to the open wound of “Without,” a tribute to his creative twin flame SOPHIE, who died in 2021: “An emptiness, a silhouette/I never guessed the loudest sounds are hollow.” Cook has spent the past few years living in America, including a lockdown in rural Montana, home to his girlfriend, the singer Alaska Reid. Feeling like a foreigner inevitably made him more aware of his Britishness, and seemingly more eager to play it up—hence the enduring Beatles mop-top. In place of the playful meta-ironies and commercial sheen of the PC Music world, Cook aligns himself with myth and magic (“Green Man,” “Crone,” “Bewitched”), stocking his lyrics with an apothecary’s worth of amulets, manuscripts, gargoyles, “skulls on the shelf” and “membranes stacked in the catacombs.”
It’s an anachronistic pivot, and with it, Cook joins a long tradition of British artists who have looked to the country’s distant past for a sense of identity unspoiled by rubbish modern life, from the Pre-Raphaelites’ obsession with King Arthur and William Blake’s vision of Albion to the reactionary nostalgia of the Kinks, Smiths, and Libertines. A longing for the notional good old days is hammered out again in Timothy Luke’s design for the album campaign, with A. G. Cook written in cod-heraldic lettering straight out of merrie olde England, while Britpop appears in the zippily optimistic curves of Mexico Olympic, the logotype designed for the ’68 Games and adapted by Pulp in the mid ’90s—notably, the last two moments when Britain was seen to be swinging.
Cook’s embrace of the mythic past mirrors a wider turn towards the wyrd in British culture, but also puts some distance between him and the PC Music experiment. By the time it wound down last year, the label had permeated the entire fabric of pop, from Beyoncé’s Renaissance (Cook has a credit on “All Up in Your Mind”) to Danny L Harle’s work for Carly Rae Jepsen and Dua Lipa, and even Camila Cabello’s recent hyperpop pivot, “I LUV IT.” Mission accomplished? Perhaps, but we can assume that Cook gets his kicks from subverting the pop hierarchy, not being absorbed into it. Not unlike Cowboy Carter hitching herself to the Wild West imaginary, Britpop opens a practical portal between Cook’s old universe—hard, bright, aggressively contemporary—and a seductively oppositional dimension of folklore, fantasy, fuzz rock, and magic.
