Switched on Pop - The new wave of pop is here, and it’s feral

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

What would it sound like if pop music was reverted to its most wild state of being? It would sound hyper-digital, influenced by the electronic vanguard of the 2010s, and speak to a post-genre audience. And while the charts have been stagnant, Gen-Z has been crafting this exact sound: one that is exciting, unpredictable, and above all else, feral. After bubbling underground for the past few years, the subgenre we’ve coined “feral pop” is finally poised to have a breakout, best exemplified by the popularity of the computer-loving Ninajirachi, pop star underscores, and rave-rapper 2hollis. This week on Switched On Pop, Reanna, Charlie, and Nate are going to tap into all that this dubstep-influenced sound has to offer, starting with the Australian DJ Ninajirachi, and explore why everyone in pop music is finally getting feral. Links: ⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠ Songs discussed: Ninajirachi – CSIRAC underscores – Music 2hollis – girl Skrillex – Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites Imogen Heap – Headlock SOPHIE – BIPP Ninajirachi – iPod touch Ninajirachi, Izzy Camina – Ninacamina Skrillex – Rock ’n’ Roll (Will Take You to the Mountain) Skrillex, Sirah – Bangarang Ninajirachi – Fuck My Computer Ninajirachi – London Song LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver Justice – Genesis Justice – Civilization Justice – Stress Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada.

All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, economy. and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-4-3 at O-D-O-O-D-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-O-com. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm producer Rianna Cruz. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter, Charlie Harding. Charlie, Nate, I'm here to talk to you guys today about a new sound coming up in pop music right now. Let's go. Some could call it DigiPop.

Others could call it post hyperpop, but it's a sound that I think is going to take over the charts in the next few years, and I've personally come to label it feral pop. Ferrell pop. And the thing is, feral pop can sound like many

things. It could sound like this, but it could also sound like this, and the wild thing is, it could also sound like this. You're my girl. You're my girl. Come here. Nightless pearl. Whisper slow in your ear.

What's making you feel feral? Well, I think there's a few things going on here. It's music that is a little bit obtuse. There's a little bit of a barrier to entry. It's not really connected to the big-ticket pop artists in mainstream music, the way that Chapel Rhone is indebted to Lady Gaga or Gracie Abrams is indebted to Taylor Swift. It's like the biggest artists in the world are influential folks like Skrillers. Image in heap

The late producer Sophie Things like that And the music is more instinctual I find it to be pop music at its most primal And the definition of feral is to be undomesticated And reverted back to a wild state of being And I think this music is feral Because it's making pop exciting

and unpredictable, even if it doesn't immediately present itself as pop music. And it sounds like a cat without a home, shrieking in heat in the dead of night. Remixed. It makes you feel feral. Yes. Okay, there we go. And those songs that I just played are by three artists that I find really embody the feral pop ethos, Nina Jarachi, underscores, and Too Hollis. And I'm guessing each of these artists' names is stylized in lowercase letters with no spaces, just going out on a limb there.

Nina's properly capitalized. But the other two, you're right on the money there. I stand corrected. Okay. This week, I want the three of us to listen to the artists that I find to be the three most important in this scene and figure out why is now the time that everyone's getting farewell. Fun. And we are ready to be school. And to do that, I want to start by defining what we're hearing in the feral pop sound.

There's a love of dubstep, an edium. As I said earlier, the DJ Scrillix is more or less the North Star to everything in this microgenre. There's also a devotion to the internet, technology, the sounds of the digital world, with lyrics that tend to be a little bit meta about said technology, the disclosion. the discomfort of fame, even music itself. And last but not least, there's a tendency to amalgamate genres within feral pop. Even amongst the three artists that we're going to be talking about this week, all of these things I mentioned result in an overall extremely online sensibility when it comes to feral pop,

which makes sense considering the fan bases that love them are Gen Z and younger, groups that have essentially come of age on the internet. So I feel like the place to start would be with your first artist, Nita Geraci? Absolutely. Speaking of being extremely online, there's no better place to start with her and her album aptly titled, I Love My Computer. That was the song iPod Touch. Okay, hold on. I heard a shout out to FL Studio, which a lot of EDM and hip-hop producers start on this piece of software to make music because it's basically free, formerly known as fruity loops.

The lyrics are so just sort of thrown out as if someone just like, here I am on the microphone, I got to come up with some words, it sounds like a laptop, I'm writing an FL Studio, it's very off the cuff. And as you could hear, it speaks to one of the main tenets of feral pop, a devotion of technology and the embrace of digital aesthetic. Yeah, she mentions Frutely Loops or FAL Studio. She mentions her computer. She mentions an iPod touch in a yellow Pikachu case. As you could tell from the album title, I Love My Computer and the lyrics of this song, there is a fetishizing of technology here, and specifically technology from previous eras. My quick Google search iPod Touchline introduced in 2007. This is a core like web 1.0, a better time, an easier time. Yeah, this song speaks fondly of that web 1.0 realness. You know, the computer.

here is an object of affection rather than a piece of machinery. And our coming apocalyptic destruction, according to all of the, you know, AI company CEOs. A utopic era is where we find ourselves in this track. You know, it's evocative. The core metaphor of the song is that Nina Durachi hears a song on our iPod Touch that reminds her of all these childhood memories. She sings, it sounds like first day, starting year eight. It sounds like Beach Day. You know, she's recalling all of these things that are brought to her because of an iPod. And the way her voice floats in as she coos about the titular iPod Touch yellow Pikachu case, it's a very familiar image and it feels very comforting.

Is that like a Pikachu saying, it sounds? What was that? Say that again, Charlie? Sorry, I didn't catch it. It sounds. Well, Pikachu famously can only say Pikachu. Pikachu. But like in a really high voice.

This is an evolved Pikachu. This is the next one. Is that like Rai Chu? Come on. Damn, that was cold, Rihanna. You didn't have to do him like that. One of us here grew up watching Pokemon, and it's not the other two people I'm on the call with. I appreciate this song sounding like it should be about a romantic relationship with another person.

Yeah. Except it's about a laptop. That's very compelling to me. And I get it. I mean, it reminds me of something actually I heard the artist Holly Herndon say, which is that, you know, your computer is kind of everything. It's where you make music. It's where you FaceTime and talk to your friends. It's where you watch shows. It's where you look at memes. It's like, what a crazy relationship. How many people do you have that kind of deep relationship with, especially in the 21st century? I'm surprised we don't have more odes. to the laptop. I think about the book, Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky, which was published in 2009, which is sort of about the promise of the internet's going to make a place where we can

all communicate and belong and tear down the old gatekeepers, which effectively comes true in the decades since, but maybe with a bunch of ramifications towards our well-being and romantic relationship to these platforms, that's really changed. There's a strong view of techno-optimism in this song. And, all of Nina Giracchi's work. And on iPod Touch specifically, maybe it's this electronic, trancy, reverb-heavy vocal, but it feels so familiar and it connects largely to the Gen Z experience because people like myself grew up alongside this technology. Nina Jarachi, a little bit of background, she's 26 years old, two months older than me. She's Australian,

which I think is cool to note. We don't really get many Australian pop imports other than like Kylie Minogue and Olivia Newton-John. Kevin Parker, Tame and Paula. But not a lot. Not a lot. Nina Jarachi is a relatively new artist. She broke through in 2017 and has released a bunch of EPs, including one that I love, called Girl Edm. There's a song on it called Nina Kamina, titled After a Combination of her name and the featured artist, Izzy Kamina.

I think I like this song so much because it harkens back to something I said earlier of Scrillix being the North Star for these artists. Listen to the beginning of Nina Kamina. We have this whoopey, stepy thing happening. It reminds me of a lot of Skrillic songs including my favorite, the track, rock and roll.

I love Whoopi Steppy. The great news about electronic music is that there's so many musical techniques that we just get to invent new words. And I think you've got it right. Both of these songs have this sort of gated synth sound or sampled sound that comes in on the offbeat and creates this dancey propulsion, the sort of p-pah-pup-pup kind of feel. And they both like to play with high-pitched vocals. That little Pikachu thing, which is not Pikachu because I've just learned the Pikachu always has Pikachu in a high voice. We heard the same kind of voice in this girl. track. Yeah, I'm not going to pretend like I'm a huge dubstep head or bro step, which I've learned is the Squillic's subgenre of dubstep that is very festival and bro-like. But I am a Skrillx head. And I think I love his early stuff because it has the steppy bead. It has massive drops. There's quick stuttering switchups.

and it's a fusion of electronic sounds with rock music energy all in the bucket of what is firmly a pop song. You know, the classic example of that is Scrillix's bangering. Ah, you're taking me back to Burning Man 2012, 3 a.m., crazy parties. I always forget you're a Burning Man guy, Charlie. It's happened. It's happened. That was the sound, though. That was the sound that everyone was playing. It's really dark music, frankly, to hear in the middle of the night out in the desert.

But to your point, though, it is as much dance music as it owes to rock. You've got those guitars. The bang-a-rang is almost just like head-bang your head. That is the move you want to do when you hear this music. At least I do. And I think a lot of that comes from Skrillix, aka Sonny Moore's previous career as a post-hardcore musician in the band from first to last. He's putting that rock hardcore ethos into electronic music and then dressing it up like it's a pop song. And in the context of Nina Durachi, thinking of the title of Nina's EP, Girl EDM that Nina Kamina is on, it seems to be winkingly referencing that sound by giving the bro-step vibe a feminine energy and skew and kind of refreshing it a little bit.

It's kind of like what Riot Girl was to the like alt and punk movement of the 90s. Girl EDM is a response to Brostep. A combination of words no one has ever said before. There's hints of that in all of Nina Geraci's music. So flashing forward to 2025, as I said, Nina's record, I Love My Computer was released. It is her debut album. The album is essentially a fever dream, as we heard an iPod, But that internet devotion reaches a fever pitch with the song, Fuck My Computer.

What? Oh, whoa, whoa. Hey, hey, hey. What did it ever do wrong? It's just trying to take all of our jobs. Sounds like an AOL startup. My computer. This is reinforcing my long-held belief that Debstep and now Girl EDS are fundamentally inspired by the early sounds of dial-up internet.

That music sounds like what happens when you log on to AOL. Welcome, you've got mail. Yeah, that was my first thought, and it goes back to one of the tenets of feral pop, the emphasis of digital textures. The use of this synth that sounds like a dial-up modem and is inviting nostalgia, but also updating it in the context of this love song to a computer. It's fascinating, right? We have the steppy bass, but we also have these vocals with these digitized elements.

There's the bleeping of the F-bomb. There's the computer interpretation of the word Nina. Even the processing on the vocals feels a little strange and artificial. Because no one in the world knows me better. It says my name. It says, so clarification, Nate and I got the title wrong when we heard it.

We thought it was an aggressive, you know, punt the computer out the window kind of after computer. The complete opposite. It's really an escalation of loving your computer and taking that idea to its logical conclusion. And I think the logical conclusion is the drop of this song, which is fully digitized, the textures are taken to the maximum. It feels like the machine becomes one with the woman singing the lyrics as the statement of, I want to bleep my computer, leads into this dubstep, EDM, huge, ultra-Miamy drop.

And the idea of To Becoming One, Woman and Computer, is emphasizes the vocals, also expand and become an abstracted machine texture themselves later in the song. She becomes the computer. Whoa. That's feral. It reminds me of Scrilex and Dobs Step 2 in the way that that drop is just kind of the manipulation of a single tone. It's just like that glitchy computerized noise. But it gets a rhythm.

And a syncopation and a feel by the way Nina Durachi like sidechanged it to the beat. So it kind of pulses in and out. And all of a sudden this tone, which could be, which is something you would hear in your daily life and be like, oh, that's so obnoxious. All of a sudden it becomes this thing that wants that like makes you want to move and and groove. And it's like the embodiment of that idea of the digital becoming soulful. We work so hard to anthropomorphize the computer and make them lovable. It makes me think back to the IMAG3, which came out in the late 90s and ran it through the early 2000s. This was like that old CRT, Johnny I have designed Apple that had beautiful color sides.

And you could get the color that matched your personality. Oh, that's a classic. I've always wanted one of those. And it's like you can imagine Nina Jarachi having that computer at home. That's where FL Studio was first downloaded. And that style of computers like, wow, we loved that thing. It was an object. It was desirable. It was playful. It was fun. And now that computers feel more and more human, we are approaching this uncanny valley where we no longer want to romantically fuck our computers. We want to literally fuck them up and get them out of our lives because they are trying to be too much like us. And the anthropomorphizing of computers no longer feels good. And I think for a lot of Gen Z and Gen Alpha people, that era of technology is something to pine after because as adults, we've only known.

the evil era of the computer and the pleasant era of technology that Nina sings about in iPod touch, there's an element of nostalgia to it that influences the way that these digital textures are incorporated into this feral pops down. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need.

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Ontario. So naturally, fuck my computer is kind of the thesis statement of everything that's happening on I Love My Computer. And while I do love that song and its core message and how it embodies a lot of what the genre speaks to, I also want to talk about the first song on the record, the track London song, because I think it also encapsulates the entirety of feral pop. Let's start from the top. Started bass guitar. I have never been to London I have never been to London, right? Where dance punk music, where dance punk music fused rock and electronic together.

We hear that in this opening base situation. Very LCD sound system. It's dirty. It's grimy. In regards to the attention to aesthetic that is in a lot of feral pop, I see it evoking the aesthetic of indie slees. Brooklyn, millennial 2000s era, you know, Williamsburg before bankers live there. Genzi has fetishized this. this aesthetic, this era, this music over the years, so it makes sense that we hear it here. But also, taking what we heard in FMy Computer and applying it here, the guitar also sounds like a chopped up printer noise or something.

Like, it's dark, it's digital, it's mechanical. Um, do you want to listen? I have never been to London. And that's the truth. You know, when you're printing something and it's like super. color and so it's taking a million years and you just hear the printer going back and forth again. Like, it's like you put that into a song. It's genius.

I really enjoy this style of writing because it's where you have to kind of write a song and then resample and chop that song up. So the song is the remix of the thing that you recorded. That bass is a bass line. Someone recorded down and then reversed, pitched around, made that printer sound. We hear the same thing with her vocal. I've never been to London is not like one straight song through vocal. It keeps getting chopped and stuttered. It's almost like the computer and the human merged together.

In this era of music, Daft Punk was doing a lot of microchopping, where they were taking little pieces, is resampling them, giving you those stutters. So I'm not surprised that we're hearing them alongside the sort of electro-clash kind of bass sound as well. Yeah, and this is really clear when the beat drops in the song. And we move from this electro-clash vibe into full festival, EDM, side-chain synth switch up. Nice. Oh, yeah. That's very early justice.

Sort of not as much dubstep. More the justice. this cross of like, cross, literally the album cross, was this crossover between rock and dance music of that exact same era. So we already have the dance punky vibes. We have the EDM vibes. And then there's a switch up into a full-on pop melody chorus as the drop gets filtered out. Ha! The computer is back. If the drop was giving cross, the melody is giving civilization by justice. Whoa, I hear it.

Sort of descending minor melody, long legato. She's studying the things I grew up on, I swear. The lyrics of the section of London song are the meta-ironic kind that we've heard before, and that is prevalent in a lot of feral pop. She starts the song by saying that she's never been to London. And in this section, this pop chorus, she clarifies that anything is possible with fingers, eyes, a mouse, and a screen. That's quite a reveal. You think like, oh, this is about someday getting on a plane and going to London.

It's like, no, I can go there virtually. It's called Google Earth. Yeah, it's so in keeping with I love my computer and fuck my computer. You know, it's like the computer is everything. It's all you need in this world. A lot of these tracks speak about being isolated, being lonely, in a very positive light. Like, it's good to be alone with your computer. I also love how dynamic this song is.

It feels very tactile. And I think that's another element of feral pop in the digital sounds, you could feel the human hands touching it. On London song, you could kind of hear the knobs on the DJ board being turned or the filters being mess. with, especially as the song has this switch up towards the end where everything hits the accelerator. Whoa. That's stress. That's cool. It's like, what if you turned the line occupied noise on a phone?

I don't know. What do you call that? The like, beep, beep, beep when your call is blocked or something? Like, what have you made that into a beat drop? We call that a busy signal? Thank you. you. As you can tell, I don't call people. I call it stress by justice, the most stressful song ever made. Another song that sounds like a fax machine. Yes. Fax Machine pop would be

another approach we could go here. But no, I think the feral pop feels very appropriate. It is bringing out something is unrestrained, it's unguarded, it's very messy. Although, funny enough, making this music, you know, all those little microtime chops and drops, It's actually highly thought out, even though its job is to just make us feel like, wha! Yeah, it's really technically sound. Maybe part of why it's connecting largely is because it feels like, as we've been talking about, the utopic version of human and machine joining hands, rather than the dystopian future of AI and computer-generated music, to be feral is to be human.

To fax is divine. So Nina, for all these reasons, is the quintessential feral pop artist. Her music has a lot going on. It contains all the aspects of feral pop encapsulated in this one record. I love my computer. We have the edium, dub steppy influence. We have a meta and winking lyrical slant. There's a whirlpool of genres all in even a single song.

And more than anything on this album, there's the devotion to technology and the fetish computer culture. And people are really connecting with it. You know, anecdotally, I saw her at Coachella this year. She was performing in the Sonora tent, which is the smallest stage at the festival. There's a line that you need to wait in to get in. I was waiting in the longest line I had ever seen for that tent. I waited for like 40 minutes to get in to see Nina Jarachi, hundreds of people biting their time just to get a taste, a little hint of what it's like to see her perform. I get in. It's so sweaty. I'm standing shoulder to shoulder with people that were just going nuts. It's awesome stuff. It's super cool. I could see her really blowing up in the next few years.

Based on everything we've heard today, I would not be surprised. As I said earlier, though, Nina's not the only important artist dipping into the waters of feral pop. There's also the artist's two Hollis and underscores, latter of which we're going to talk about in our next episode coming at you tomorrow. Switch on Pop is produced by Raina Cruz, edited by Alyssa Soap, engineered by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Arnottlieb, video by Nick Rips, by theme of song is by Zach Tenario and Jossi Adams of Ark Iris, or a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe to NYMag.com slash pod.

This is a special week, Farrell Pop three days in a row. Tune in tomorrow for more Farrell Pop. People can check out more music on our podcast at Switchonpop.com. And until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you.

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