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20 hours ago
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Everyone is trying to out-scream and out-diva each other at AG Cook’s sold-out Brooklyn Paramount show. Midway through his Friday-night DJ set for his Britpop 25 tour, the producer and moptopped dungeon master of the hyperpop universe has put on his Von Dutch remix, a standout single from last summer’s Brat invasion that brings pop princesses Charli xcx and Addison Rae together for some prima donna repartee atop a distorted, industrial production. When the bridge’s thumping hydraulic bass drops and opens up its warped wormhole of sound, the packed room suddenly fills with skilled (too skilled) impressions of Rae’s piercing six-second shriek. Cook, who has been bopping behind the DJ booth up until now, collapses to his knees at the center of the stage, bowled over by the sheer energy in the room.
Such are the demands of Cook’s delirious brand of pop: like a black hole, it must suck you into its vortex. Cook emerged on the scene in 2013 with his London-based experimental pop music label PC Music, and his supersized exaggerations of mainstream pop cliches – think Auto-Tuned voices pitch-shifted to a pip-squeak chipmunk register, cartoon boing-splat-zap sound effects on steroids, and glossy, hyper-artificial production – invited intensely polarized responses. Depending on whom you asked at the time, PC Music was either the piss-take creation of a deeply unsatisfied art school student with some personal, unresolved vendetta against pop music, or an explosive collective of rabble-rousers redefining electronic music and bringing a much-needed dash of girly playfulness to the UK’s mostly macho house revival scene. Yet, love it or hate it, Cook’s brand of pop maximalism ultimately proved here to stay: by the end of the label’s decade-long run, Cook was working with megastars such as Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, and artists of the extended PC Music-verse – including frequent Cook collaborator Charli xcx and the late Sophie – were rightful stars of their own.
Yet in Cook’s roving mind, the horizons of pop are constantly shifting. When PC Music shuttered in 2023, it appeared to be the end of an era; but by the following year, Cook had launched a new record label New Alias, released his third full-length solo album Britpop, and executive-produced Charli xcx’s career-defining Brat.
Part of the immense pleasure of a Cook set is the feeling that you might be witnessing an early draft of pop’s future. In a Paul Valéry-esque fashion, no song ever appears complete in Cook’s hands; he’s constantly taking apart his masterpieces, stretching and re-molding them like silly putty. It’s astounding to see how expansive Cook’s world is, and the set cycles through numerous eras, from a 2015 Cook and Sophie remix of French electronic group Yelle’s Moteur Action to last year’s biggest Brat hits.
At their best, Cook’s reinventions can feel absolutely ecstatic. Out of Time, Britpop’s seven-minute-long closing opus, melds a chest-obliterating bass that keeps one hammered to the floor with airy, celestial synths that pull one heavenward; the two contrasting sounds stretch one’s mind-body out like a Slinky. When Cook finally mashes Xcxoplex up in the mix and Charli xcx’s voice beams down, singing “I close my eyes and elevate”, it feels like one of those divine drug-fueled revelations that are simultaneously hyper-literal and hyper-surreal.
Cook has always looked a bit more like a slack rocker than a hyperpop artist, eschewing the grungy club-rat memo for what PC Music artist GFOTY has characterized as a “normcore” style. (Essentially: baggy shirt and pants, plus the aforementioned shaggy moptop.) So Cook delivers on this front: a few times throughout the night, Cook leaves the DJ booth to perform some of his fuzz rock, midwest emo-flavored tracks. He strums his guitar and moans out the wistful, melancholic lyrics for Being Harsh (“I tried so hard to learn to say ‘Get out of my way’”) from his 2020 debut solo album 7G, before dovetailing into surprising acoustic renditions of some of his most aggressively synthetic songs, including Superstar, Silver and, most delightfully, Lucifer, a moody pop girl track originally sung by Charli xcx and Rae.
Of course, the booth is still his bread and butter. And the party must go on. Near the end of the night, after more tracks of the sugar-high cartoons-on-acid variety, Cook plays Brat’s Everything Is Romantic, chopping up Charli’s vocals to a trance-inducing repetition of “Everything, everything, everything, everything is” and sending them careening down a zip line of synths and drums. The open suggestiveness of “everything is” – its elision hanging over our nodding and bouncing heads like some forever-tantalizing dot-dot-dot – feels prophetic. A euphoric, optimistic blueprint for our type of pop.
