PC Music can retire now because its influence is everywhere

When I interviewed A. G. Cook last year, I asked if he had plans to celebrate the 10th anniversary of PC Music, the record label he founded in 2013 that would go on to make a profound impact on the decade’s experimental electronic music and underground pop. Yes, he replied: “I can’t resist numerical things like that.” True to his word, last month PC Music marked the occasion with a huge announcement: that, after a decade of activity, the label would cease releasing new music entirely. After 2023, PC Music will instead be “dedicated to archival projects and special reissues”, the label explained on their website.

I don’t know the internal reasons for this decision, but externally, shutting down seems the right call – bittersweet as it might be. Many artists once associated with PC Music, like Danny L Harle and Namasenda, have moved on to new labels or gone independent. Recent releases by Holly Waxwing and Astra King have felt much smaller in scale compared to some of the label’s earlier universe-conquering ambitions. A.G. himself seems to be increasingly busy as a producer and songwriter, with recent credits on Beyoncé’s Renaissance, Christine and the Queens’ Paranoia, Angels, True Love, and Charli XCX’s Crash. Yet there’s an even simpler reason that now feels like the right time – we’re living in a world that PC Music foresaw.

A. G. Cook first started PC Music in June 2013, when he was a recent Goldsmiths graduate. No stranger to unorthodox concepts (his father, Sir Peter Cook, was a co-founding member of the highly influential 1960s avant-garde architecture collective Archigram), he was fascinated by the idea of ‘Personal Computer Music’: not just computer music with a human personality, but which understood that the computer could magnify that personality. The label’s early releases varied stylistically, with straight-up pop songs jostling with bizarro club bangers and experimental pieces, but they often shared a strange and incredibly artificial sound, littered with rapidly sped-up vocals, hectic micro-sampling, a ballistic approach to sound manipulation, juddering syncopation, and particularly the use of non-trained singers. When A.G. was producing, he treated amateur vocalists like major label stars, eschewing the fuzzy lo-fi aesthetic more commonly found in DIY music for ultra-glossy, high-tech, maximal instrumentals that drew from then-contemporary Top 40 (like David Guetta and Max Martin), critically disregarded UK dance genres (e.g. bassline and happy hardcore), MIDI pop (by way of Max Tundra and Cupid & Psyche 85), as well as more niche influences (Rustie’s euphoro-rave, the experimental label Hippos in Tanks).

The overall result was unfamiliar and uncanny, heightened by the hyperreal digital imagery associated with the label: CGI that felt like an exaggerated take on the CD-ROM, Y2K and Web 1.0 eras; glossy artist photos straight from the world of celebrity photoshoots, lifestyle magazines and advertising – albeit with excessive photoshopping that heightened their falseness. The influence of artists like Ryan Trecartin and the DIS collective loomed large – the latter had even presented a PC Music-esque project, the semi-fictitious HDBOYZ (“The World’s First High Definition Boy Band”), a couple of years before the label began. There was a lot of humour in the music and creative direction, and critics were divided. Was this merely an ironic parody of pop music created by art school poseurs who held the genre in contempt? Or could this radically different sound actually represent the future of pop?

A decade later and the label has unquestionably outgrown the former accusation, but PC Music never quite became the future of pop either – at least not by traditional metrics of success. The highest any of its singles ever reached in the UK charts was #64 (Danny L Harle’s “Broken Flowers”), while its signees’ streaming numbers tend to be lower than other comparably sized indie and electronic acts. Instead its individual artists and associates are considered cult icons rather than household names, most notably SOPHIE, the visionary artist and producer who tragically died in 2021 (SOPHIE was never officially part of the PC Music roster, but had so many collaborations and shared so many live bills that she is considered part of their universe).

This is not to say that PC Music had no mainstream reach though. Their most tangible impact has been in working with other pop stars. SOPHIE produced for Madonna, MØ, Vince Staples, and Kim Petras — somehow successfully fitting into their respective artistic visions without compromising her own style. Danny L Harle has contributed songwriting, production, and instrumentation to leftfield pop artists like Rina Sawayama, Clairo, Oklou, and Shygirl; though his most fruitful collaboration has been with Caroline Polachek, co-writing and co-producing her astoundingly original albums Pang and Desire, I Want to Turn Into You (looking ahead, he’s also been photographed in the studio with Dua Lipa). Even a lesser-known artist like easyFun’s Finn Keane has been busy in the songwriting and production world, having worked with artists like Rita Ora and Bree Runway, though not necessarily bringing them a ‘PC’ sound.

Of course, the artist who did the most to push PC Music-like aesthetics in a mainstream setting is Charli XCX. When she first connected with the label in 2014, she was riding high off a string of pop hits like Icona Pop’s “I Love It”, Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”, and her own “Boom Clap”, but her work suddenly took a 180-degree turn with the harsh and jarring Vroom Vroom EP. Produced with SOPHIE and featuring Hannah Diamond, Vroom Vroom baffled her label and critics, but was a significant realisation of Charli’s creative vision: “I felt like I finally found someone who could articulate my ideas sonically,” she told Vogue. The EP’s influence has only grown over the years, particularly in queer pop scenes, so much so that two separate apologies have been written for the scathing 4.5/10 review it initially received in Pitchfork. Working with A.G. as her creative director, Charli subsequently released some of the strongest (and often strangest) pop of the 2010s, with production coming from lesser recognised PC Music acts like Lil Data, umru, ö, and Planet 1999. The world finally caught up when her fifth album CRASH reached number one in the UK last year.

But PC Music’s impact extends beyond the projects its artists had a direct hand in shaping. 100 gecs are perhaps the most obvious inheritors of the label’s more OTT ideas, and Laura Les has talked about how hearing PC Music’s DJ mixes on SoundCloud shaped the band’s sound: “Their music has just always felt like the perfect representation of freedom in the age of the internet.” The niche digital subcultures surrounding ‘bubblegum bass’ and ‘hyperpop’ are part of this continuum too, though the latter genre has splintered off and mutated significantly since the height of its press coverage during the pandemic.

Meanwhile the American electronic musicians Skrillex and Porter Robinson have both noted the label’s impact, as have UK bands like Caroline Polachek-approved dance-punks PVA and Liverpool’s baggy-meets-hyperpop outfit Courting. The London art-pop duo Jockstrap have cited the label’s maximalism and humour as much as its sound as a touchpoint, while the hyped electronic duo Two Shell’s digital sound, playful presentation, and wry sensibility feels like it’s picking up a thread left hanging from PC Music’s early days, TikTokifying the sound for modern listeners (Two Shell are also rumoured to have been in the studio with Polachek).

I feel I can hear their unconscious influence in other genres too. Underground dance music has embraced commercial pop in recent years (a phenomenon thoroughly investigated by DJ Mag), and at raves today, DJs often reach for cheeky pop edits, or spin ‘hard dance’ styles like breakbeat hardcore, bouncy techno, and gabber – it’s similar to what I’d hear in PC Music artists DJ Warlord and Spinee’s sets back in 2014. I could even believe they’ve had a subtle influence on British indie rock, though others may disagree. Articles about the comic, rhythmatised ‘sprechgesang’ style of speak-singing favoured by many of today’s post-punk revival acts point to Sleaford Mods and IDLES as precursors (via the lineage of Mike Skinner, John Cooper Clark, and Mark E. Smith). But despite the immediate stylistic differences, I’d wager that a few of these bands, namely those coming from London’s art schools and DIY music scenes, would have also been taking in tunes like “Bobby”, “Pink and Blue”, “Hey QT”, and “Sick Beat” when they were first forming.

It’s PC Music’s thematic and conceptual ideas that have proven most prescient though. They recognised that music would soon be superseded in importance by image and branding. Their examinations of personal relationships, authenticity and identity in the digital age were genuinely imaginative – unlike the exhausting number of albums, TV series, stand-up specials, and New York Times bestselling millennial writing on these subjects that flooded the market in the late 2010s. With “Hey QT”, a real pop song fronted by a fictional pop star, which existed to promote a fictional energy drink that briefly became a real energy drink, they foresaw how the forces of music, marketing, celebrity and social media were coalescing around products – everything from the alcohol brands and beauty empires launched by musician celebrities to something like Prime.

PC Music started when the hyper-online 2010s were kicking off in earnest, so it’s only fitting that they should be ending in 2023, when the streaming revolution has failed and social media has lost most of its shine. So what’s next? If the label truly did predict what direction things were trending in, then its final releases point towards one possible future. Holly Waxwing’s The New Pastoral is a lush ambient record about reconnecting with nature. Astra King’s First Love is an intimate set of pop songs about youthful infatuation and its attendant growing pains. Felicita’s Spalarkle updates the provincial whimsy of late 60s psychedelia for modern ears. Perhaps it’s time to get off the computer and rediscover the personal.