1997-1999United States

Glitch Pop

A flexible, loosely documented tag for pop-minded electronic music that keeps its digital seams audible.

Origins and context

The label grew out of late-1990s glitch culture in electronic music and was later applied more broadly to pop-adjacent scenes in online and indie-electronic discourse.

United States

The sound

Characteristics

Digital clicks and pops
Software-edited vocals
Fragmented beats
Synthesizers
Sample-based production
Laptop/DAW-based arrangement

How to listen

Start here

Start with a melody-first track, then notice how the edits and textures keep interrupting it
Listen for clicks, clipped transients, and vocals that have been treated as part of the sound design

Mood

Playful
Restless
A little alien

History

Glitch pop is a later offshoot of glitch aesthetics, which took shape in the late 1990s as electronic musicians turned digital errors, software artifacts, and damaged-sounding fragments into compositional material. AllMusic places the glitch style’s emergence in the late ’90s, and MusicBrainz lists glitch pop as a subgenre of indietronica influenced by glitch, IDM, and pop. In practice, the label has been used loosely around pop-adjacent electronic music that keeps melody and song form in the foreground while letting the seams show. Coverage of artists such as Ms. John Soda, Schneider TM, Majical Cloudz, yeule, and Grimes shows the term being applied to different corners of that spectrum, from tender bedroom electronics to more abrasive, synthetic pop experiments.

Notable artists