The Return of Electroclash
After it surged from the keyboards of amateur musicians in the late-1990s to rule over the late-2000s pop queendom, a third wave of electroclash is upon us.
Photo by Harley Weir
It’s 2024, and the roughly 20-year nostalgia cycle that governs trends in fashion, music and culture at-large has brought us back to the mid-2000s. Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, the original purveyors of Juicy Couture velour tracksuits, revived them for a SKIMS collection. 2000s staple Von Dutch, whose iconic trucker hats were seen on the heads of everyone from Jay-Z to Britney Spears, has been brought back into the spotlight by Gen-Z shoppers after a long period of dormancy.
The Von Dutch renaissance hasn’t only occurred in the realm of fashion, though. On February 22nd, Charli XCX packed 400 of her most loyal fans into a Bushwick warehouse—along with staples of 2020s celebrity culture like Julia Fox and Addison Rae—for a delirious, sweaty rave hosted by Boiler Room. The fashion of the attendees was as omnivorous as one would expect from a Brooklyn crowd these days, but it was nonetheless marked by plenty of 2000s staples: wraparound sunglasses, t-shirts plastered with bold slogans (see: Charli’s CULT CLASSIC t-shirt) and many, many Von Dutch trucker hats. “Von dutch” also happens to be the title of the visceral, exhilarating lead single of Charli’s upcoming sixth studio album, Brat, which was birthed in the clubs and has been said to draw heavy inspiration from the club classics of Charli’s youth.
“Von dutch” is a sucker punch of a track: its kinetic, pounding beat and buzzing synth line are intoxicating, and its songwriting is remarkably efficient, even for Charli’s standards—there’s only one 4-bar verse, and the rest of the song punches you around between hook after hook. Charli sing-raps the track’s brash lyrics with a bratty attitude fed through hard Auto-Tune to a delirious effect. Stylistically and thematically, the song caricatures the club classics of Charli’s youth: the bratty vocals recall Kesha, Lady Gaga and Robyn circa-2010, and the winking lyrics about being the object of a culture’s obsession and derision recall Britney Spears’ Blackout.
The tabloid culture of the 2000s was notoriously vicious—stars were born from scandal just as quickly as they could be extinguished from it. In 2007, after experiencing relentlessly frenzied hounding by the media and suffering a very public mental breakdown, Spears shunned the world’s desire for any insight into her personal life and released Blackout. Any references that Spears does make to her controversial public image find her simply reveling in it (see: “Piece of Me”), and the rest of the gleefully hedonistic record is firmly preoccupied with partying and pleasure. The way Spears placed an impenetrable distance between herself as an artist and herself as a person would influence how some other pop stars would choose to handle their celebrity, but the actual sound of Blackout would come to define an entire era of pop.
Blackout’s thumping, four-on-the-floor beats, distorted, buzzy synths, sleazy lyrics and ultra-processed, robotic vocals didn’t come out of nowhere, though—even at its most mainstream, pop is always in conversation with the underground. The sonic identities that it adopts and then sheds often reflect sounds that have bubbled up in other spaces in years prior. Around the turn of the century, the 2-step rhythm snuck its way out of the UK garage scene to grab a foothold onto pop, even making its way onto Spears’ “That’s Where You Take Me.” At the same time, the slyly futuristic, jittery production of hip-hop and R&B stalwarts like Pharrell and Timbaland formed the bedrock of chart-topping singles like Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U” and Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.”
Likewise, many of Blackout’s distinctive traits were first assembled in the late ‘90s, when a disparate group of often amateur musicians from New York, Detroit, Germany and the Netherlands began to shape what would later be recognized as the electroclash scene. Electroclash itself was heavily recycled: its raw synth lines were pulled from ‘80s electro and synth-pop, and its abrasive, distorted edges were inspired by early synth-punk. Its minimally arranged percussion drew heavy influence from contemporary techno, despite the fact that the scene’s trademark sense of trashy humor and showmanship arose as a reaction to techno’s perceived rigidity. Its aesthetics and emphasis on performance art also drew inspiration from the past: 1982 sci-fi cult classic film Liquid Sky is often cited as being one of the scene’s primary visual influences. The film’s vibrant, avant-garde depiction of New York’s underground culture—achieved using outlandish, DIY costumes, vivid bursts of color and androgynous stylings—resonated with the rebellious, countercultural ethos of the electroclash scene.
What felt most novel about the genre were the vocals. Electroclash artists often straddled the line between speaking and singing, and their monotonous delivery through a range of vocoders stood in stark contrast to their much sillier lyrics. The lyrical content of most early electroclash songs is concerned with two things: explicitly sexual references and satirizing the lives of the rich and famous. The result is far removed from what anyone would call good taste—these songs are trashy, sleazy and not meant to be taken seriously. “Frank Sinatra” by Miss Kittin, an early electroclash classic, starts with: “Every night with my star friends / We eat caviar and drink champagne / Sniffing in the VIP area / We talk about Frank Sinatra / You know Frank Sinatra? / He’s dead.” With all due respect to Miss Kittin and other electroclash acts, they were far from being celebrities. The irreverent satirizing of celebrity culture that was so common on electroclash songs was rooted in an outsider’s perspective, and so when artists from this scene, such as Fischerspooner and Goldfrapp, did find wider success, most ended up shedding the electroclash sound altogether.
By 2005, the original wave of electroclash was essentially over, but it had seeped into other sounds that dominated the bloghouse scene, such as new rave and electro house. Artists like Justice and Soulwax took its 80s electro-influenced synths and blew the sound up to new proportions, taking it to new heights of popularity in the European club circuit and readying the foundations of its arrival into mainstream pop. The prologue to electroclash’s eventual grasp on pop music happened concurrently with its dominance of the underground. Madonna was the first major pop artist to incorporate the genre’s influences into her work, but her forays into it ended up as an anomaly within the rest of her discography and pop music at large. 2000’s Music and 2003’s American Life, made in collaboration with French producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï, are electropop albums at their core, but they pulled in a diverse array of influences, including funk, house, country, folk and electroclash-influenced buzzing synths and the occasional half-spoken, half-sung verse (see: the title track of American Life).
The experimental direction that these albums took was beguiling, and the odd sound and clunkiness of some of the lyrics on American Life led to it being critically panned and rejected by the general public, who were perhaps not yet ready for electroclash’s entrance into the mainstream. Rolling Stone opened their review of the record by saying, “American Life, her tenth album, isn’t much as a work of music — diluted Eurotechno from her producer Mirwais, built around acoustic-guitar vamps that are either her own or about on her level — but it is a certain marker in popular culture.” The criticism around the album’s perceived lack of musicality misses the mark—Madonna and Mirwais weren’t diluting Eurotechno and they weren’t limited by any lack of talent, they were just embracing a novel sound.