Way back when the first wave of PC Music releases rose up unannounced from the deep end of the Internet, the crew were contextualized as revisionists, open-sourcing the code for mainstream millennial pop and reporgramming it into something that sounded, to many ears, both recognizable and alien (or, if you those early singles were not your thing, like some totally stupid Tumblr prank). The more things change, the more they stay the same: with each year, it becomes clearer that the PC mission was not to break pop music up, but to upgrade it in their own image from the inside.
See: “Love Incredible,” the new single from EDM star Cashmere Cat and anchored by real-world famous singer Camila Cabello — and yet, even considering the big personalities at play, this track is defined by the unmistakable presence of SOPHIE, who brings in all the high-pitch effects and Giphy synths he can carry. Where once a SOPHIE-produced vocal run would be retouched into something impossibly software-perfect, here Cabello’s voice is able to translate this same idea to flesh and blood, whose own diva-ness somehow winds up being even more uncanny than the android processing in “Bipp.”
In making the jump from Soundcloud to the radio (or actually Vevo, I guess), SOPHIE and co’s biggest play has not been to bend toward the mainstream, but to expose that the mainstream was maybe always ready to bend in this direction, waiting to be lead Pied Piper-like down a new path of commonly acceptable freakiness (as one YouTube commenter says: “love the song but damn that ending scared the fuck outta me”).
