Pour one out for the security team at Kentish Town Forum. Watching them try to keep the fans in the balcony seated during 100 Gecs’ debut UK headline show was like watching someone battle a hydra: every time one audience member was subdued, two more sprang up in their place. By the time the band – St Louis, Missouri producers and vocalists Laura Les and Dylan Brady – ended their set, with a boisterous rendition of 800db Cloud, security had given up: in their live shows, as in their recorded music, 100 Gecs defy all logic and, especially, all rules.
100 Gecs broke out in 2019 with 1000 Gecs, an album of crushingly loud pop that combined emo and EDM with dubstep, chiptune, rap-rock and ska. The almost comical intensity of their music, as well as Les and Brady’s avant garde, extremely online sensibility, turned the album into a viral success; by the end of 2019, the pair were the poster children of hyperpop, a microgenre of eccentric, internetty electronic music that was basically willed into existence after the creation of a Spotify playlist bearing its name.
