1,000 words for 1000 gecs.
Because it’s a year old!
There’s an entire generation of kids out there who grew up with an identical set of very specific circumstances despite being separated by an ocean and scattered across two continents. At some point during their childhood (likely their early teens) they fully realised, and subsequently built an identity around, their passion for music and performance. But they each had an identical problem: this was the late ’00s, the age of auto-tuned rap stars and electropop “divas”*, from which it was easy to feel alienated.
With the Internet readily positioned as a window to the underground, they sought refuge in its more alternative corners. Salad Fingers, Hot Topic’s online catalogue, YouTube Poop videos, MySpace at its peak. From there, the lure of emo and popular metalcore enticed them, and it probably wasn’t long before they were scene kids listening to trance metal and crunkcore. Maybe they wore shutter shades and a keffiyeh as part of the same outfit.
I was one of these kids.
Awaiting us, though, was the moment most of us would leave it behind. The world doesn’t stop turning; purple skinnies become muted denim slim fits. That’s life. But leaving it behind doesn’t mean we let go. Nightcore and crunkcore, Salad Fingers, MySpace, even the electropop divas and auto-tuned rap stars who turned out to be our friends — they still lurk beneath the surface of our personalities, significantly influencing our outlook and creativity. And if 100 Gecs are anything to go by, it’s our turn to make the music now.
100 Gecs are Dylan Brady and Laura Les. You saw them up there, staring at a tree. Maybe ‘Money Machine’ graced your Twitter timeline recently. To categorise them as “electronic” loosely describes the duo’s sound, but it arguably does a disservice to their attempts to break pop conventions and deconstruct the notion of genre. They produce “an anarchic assault on the ears” that utilises “chipmunked pop-punk vocals, harsh noise, and over-driven bro-step drops” to create “abrasive, maximalist pop music”.
Intrigued?
For the longest time, I wasn’t either. After the release of their debut 1000 Gecs on May 31, 2019, they generated quite the discussion. But beyond Danny L Harle and Slayyyter, I hadn’t invested myself in PC Music or other “bubblegum bass” acts up until then. I appreciated their endeavours and their futuristic sound but, to me, 100 Gecs were another group I’d appreciate but never truly fall for. I only relented because I saw just how short their debut album was: 23 minutes.
And guess who didn’t look back from there? Yup, this guy.
After spending a few months in their company, I now ask myself whether 100 Gecs were conceived just for me. They are my summer 2009 experience perfectly distilled — not just the music I loved and was passionate about, but the stuff I hated as well. They are everything my purple skinnies embodied. I never once considered the possibility of a band being able to credibly cite ‘Like a G6' and eatmewhileimhot! as principal influences in 2019, but the universe finds a way.
Take the dizzying interludes, ‘I Need Help Immediately’ and ‘gecgecgec’. If they’re not YouTube Poops masquerading as chaotically edited and frantically assembled sound collages then I don’t know what else they are. And the explosive final act of opener ‘745 sticky’ features violent screams reminiscent of OneyG’s animated shorts. It’s not a record dripping in irony, but the selection and manipulation of abrasive and evocative samples captures the anarchic sense of humour contained in YouTube’s fledgling subcultures.
And there are moments, such as the opening sections of ‘Hand Crushed By a Mallet’ & ‘Gec 2 U’, that capture the auto-tuned melodrama of Attack Attack!’s aesthetics so perfectly that you’d mistake them for deep cuts from Someday Came Suddenly. That might seem unremarkable, but Attack Attack! are the butt of the joke in the alternative music community. So hearing 100 Gecs employ their methods to create fascinating tunes has arguably vindicated the 15 year-old inside of me who still can’t get enough of “Stick Stickly” for some reason.
Attack Attack! themselves (and other scene kid favourites such as Brokencyde, I Set My Friends on Fire, and 3OH!3) were heavily indebted to the southern hip hop and trap artists who broke into the mainstream after the millennium and dominated the charts thereafter (Lil Jon, T.I.) — just as myself, Les, and Brady all hit our mid-teens. 100 Gecs’ fondness for that sound is clear, and it’s a welcome hit of nostalgia that only further cements this record’s secondary function as an impenetrable time capsule.
In the seemingly boundless and bewildering combination of sounds that this record bathes itself in, it’s also comforting to hear tones and textures reminiscent of everything from the dance pop that dominated the radio playlists to the bedroom artists who gained attention through MySpace at the same time. It’s the work of two people who have captured the essence of that specific time and space to bring together opposing cultures in perfect harmony, preserving them in such a way that they’ll continue to live on in the ears of the next generation. By aping so much of the past, they’ve created music that sounds as though it’s been beamed back from the future.
1000 Gecs is bizarre. 100 Gecs know it and so do their fans. There is no argument to be won, it’s not a grower. If it doesn’t click instantly then it probably never will. But if it does, it will be because it spoke to something inside of you that was so specific and personal that no other record managed to find it. Our relationships with music (and art in general) should never based on “quality”, they should be based on the feelings and meanings we derive from them. 1000 Gecs reminds me so much of my former self that, as far behind me as my scene days are, it will forever ensure that I never let them go.
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*. Kesha has endured some seriously tough times since ‘Tik Tok’s release, and it’s likely that she was going through serious difficulty back in 2009, so I want to clarify something. The song’s use as an example of a single released by an “electropop diva” is not intended as a slight on her, but more a reference to how she was perceived by (mostly male) teenagers like myself who, at the time, “hated mainstream music” — or what they perceived mainstream music to be — because of pretty ignorant rationalisations. I wish Kesha the very best.
