When people my age talk to me about newer independent music it tends to fall into one of 2 or 3 camps. It's either another boring wannabe Black Country, New Road type, some Drain Gang or RCB "inspired" Hip-Hop artist and then the final one would probably have to be Internet stuff that's sometimes parasitically tied to either the LGBT, furry, brony comunity or some other subculture that always has 1 million breakbeats layered over itself with scream rapping by a sweaty looking white trans woman. The last part may sound specific but explains about 38 active musicians in the hyperpop-adjacent sphere, one of which being Femtanyl.
Femtanyl (at this point being a solo act) actively made not one single interesting, creative or new choice during the process of this EP even for the time it came out.
The first track in particular sounded like a barely manipulated preset (Damon Albarn would love it), the influences of HexD sounded more like gentrification and watering down than anything, the mixing was ugly at the best of times and was constantly muddy, default piano synth template 1 plays generic chord progressions throughout, we have boring Slipknot-esque scream rapping vocal delivery and was overall generic, but here's my real issue that weighs the whole thing down.
The 2020s music landscape is very obviously skewed towards highly produced, synthetic sounding music. Charli XCX, PinkPantheress, Drain Gang, 2hollis etc. Y'know, shit that people say is Hyperpop but usually isn't (according to who? Mostly trustfund journalists who get paid to overrate the manufactured scene by labels in return for them taking credit for a false narrative they can claim to have coined).
Then there's the sad trend of unsung heroes like $piritgurlz, bliss3three, 999 Heartake Sabileye and others wallowing in obscurity and retiring at like age 21. Meanwhile Femtanyl gets to run around with no influence on anyone, rehashed ideas and not a single catchy tune to their name. Why? Because she's good at drawing and can make cool internet-coded cover arts for her music to exploit a subculture of furries and her song titles are chronically online sounding and sometimes trans-themed. Katamari and Girl hell 1999 have titles with all the wit and creativity you could get out of AI and sound like some trite that'd be playing in the background of the most unfunny instagram reel ever and are apparently some of their better and more popular songs. Just utterly indistinguishable from all the boring overproduced sounding trend-following music that the 2020s will be pointed at and laughed at for decades down the line the same way the 80s is for AOR and New Romantic.
They're running around with borrowed ideas, that sound like noise pollution and get to maintain a fanbase purely off of something you don't even need your ears to observe. We went from hexd and hyperpop being a refraction of the past and a post-modern usage of limitations and production elements imposed on a piece of music for psychedelic and nostalgic purposes, to them being a call and response pavlovian bell for mindless, brand worshipping, clothes label loving dilettantes to activate their narcissistic need for self-validation through overwhelming yet comfortably unexperimental stimuli that evokes rotting in bed all day watching a constant stream of information and getting told who to be by advertising companies. Music is my escape, so why would I wanna fetishize and reenact the saddest parts of modern day living?
If you can't make music then you're just a Mickey Mouse logo and a few sprinkled queer-baiting titles and scream-rapped trans themed or selfhating lyrics away from a fanbase. Gentrification and pandering at its most obvious.
Sorry if the criticism of the musical content was brief but it's clearly a second thought to the artist's fashion bullshit they're trying to push.
See also: Machine Girl, Astrid
Listen here: Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp
2/10
- YonDivi
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