Hyperpop Princess
Hyperpop artist Madge is a pioneering voice within their genre. Currently working on their second studio album, with a new EP entitled ravepack 2 soon to drop, and a collab list decorated with names like Brooke Candy and Slayyyter, this counterculture darling seems poised to break into the mainstream. Frequently co-writing with Tzar and collaborating with producer Grandbankss, their sound feels fresh and exciting. I sat down with them to discuss their latest video, shiversucker (ft. Suzi Wu), which was inspired by their religious fundamentalist upbringing.
Hyperpop artist Madge’s new music video shiversucker, directed by Tantron, is a savage and angry but visually beautiful exploration of their rural religious roots.
The video opens on Madge, gathering water and smoking a cigarette, clad in colonial era clothing, their tattoos still visible. After making their way through the fields which surround their small cabin, they enter to find their sister-wives optimistically watching their older husband’s body swing from a noose. What ensues is a chaotic imagining of what these sister-wives might do given this newfound freedom, punctuated by Madge’s of-the-moment bit-crushed beats and sped-up singing.
The pastoral scenery and traditional religious costuming contrasts with Madge’s edgy joyful energy and ass-shaking music, in a way that blows right past unsettling and makes the viewer feel as if they are watching the birth of a brand new aesthetic. While other artists may try to pull off the bonnet/face tat combo, it is Madge’s genuine claim to both of these pieces of iconography that leads to the piece's ultimate feeling of authenticity.
After first witnessing this personal, vulnerable, and punk as hell art piece, I knew I had to sit down with them to talk about it.
Right before our interview, I browsed Madge’s social media in order to conduct a bit of last-minute research. Somehow, in the past week, they had become a full-on popstar. Their Instagram stories showed them performing to a crowd of 15,000 in Seoul; full makeup and hair, costumes, backup dancers, over the top lighting, and special effects. Confused, I dialed their number, not fully sure they would answer.
“Hey!” they said, in their bright and charismatic voice.
“Hey,” I said, still confused. “Where are you?”
“Oh, I jussst got back to New York,” they said.
“Well, I have all these questions,” I said. “But first, what the fuck has been happening?!”
“Stooop!” they said, laughing with humility. “I just performed at Valorant Champions which is a world-wide video game competition for the game Valorant from Riot Games– they also do League of Legends, so it’s a similar fan base. It’s very popular in East Asia, so they usually hold the championships there. I made a song for Valorant, which is the anthem for their non-binary agent Clove who is a fantastical magical fairy-like punk who has the ability to stop time–”
“So you,” I said, laughing. Everything was finally coming into focus.
“Exactly,” they said, laughing with me. “I wrote the song earlier this year, and they asked me to come perform it for the World Championship.”
“Have you ever done anything like that?” I asked.
“Not like that,” they said. “I did have a guest appearance with DJ Kaskade, which was also a massive arena crowd. But it wasn’t the same level of ‘live.’ This was me singing, dancing, microphone on, backup dancers.”
“It was giving VMA’s!” I said, literally shaking with excitement for them.
“It was insane,” they sighed. “To be honest, I’m totally dissociative right now. I’m still trying to process what exactly happened. I barely know where I am or who I am. I basically blacked out for a week.”
“So you were a popstar for a whole week?” I asked.
“It was an alternate reality where sometimes I was a superstar,” they explained. “I had a security detail, I was hanging out with K-Pop idols, and there was a bizarre superstar element to it. But on the flip side, the reality is that I am not a K-Pop idol and I am not a global superstar on that level. There was a lot of the nitty gritty– just the schlepping of travel. I brought my friend and she stayed in my room, like little goblins trying to stretch our per diem as far as possible. We ate only kimchi and rice for the whole week. There were many non-glamorous moments. But yea, there was some pop-star s%!t, it felt cool.”
“Did it inspire you to try and achieve that kind of fame for real?”
“Maybe,” they said, reluctantly. “I mean, I’m going to keep making weird shit.”
“Ok, now that I’m up to speed we can get back to our regular interview,” I said, as we both started laughing again. Despite being an obvious rock star with a stunning look, Madge is fully at ease and approachable. “How did you get into music originally?”
“I grew up doing music,” they said. “I grew up playing the piano competitively from a very young age. My mother sacrificed a lot to be able to afford that for me. She was very involved in my life. I did not like music growing up. I loved listening to music and I loved creating it– but I did not like performing classical music. It was rigid and oppressive and stressful. That said, it was the inception point of what I’m able to do now, which is handling all aspects of music: production, writing, performing. That is all built on the foundation my mom helped give me, so I am very grateful for it now.”
“I know people generally call your music ‘hyperpop,” I said. “Is that how you define it?”
“Yes, so it’s called hyperpop now,” they began. “But fun fact, Spotify invented that term to describe a playlist that they put my music on. That was in 2020, and I have somehow ended up on the playlist every year. So, yes, I claim her now!”
“So you don’t play hyperpop, you ARE hyperpop,” I said.
“I ammmm, honey!” they said, giggling. “No, that sounds so egotistical. The truth is, I was part of a bigger wave of people making ‘internet music–’ which is how I describe it to my mother. I was one of many experimenting with bit-crushed sped-up pop sounds. We all got lumped together into the beautiful genre that is now known as hyperpop.”
“When I hear the stuff blowing up in mainstream pop music right now– Billie Eilish’s new album and definitely Charli XCX’s new album– it sounds a lot like what you’ve been releasing for a while.”
“That’s really nice of you to say,” they said, genuinely. “Thank you. Of course, I’d love to claim that and be like, ‘I’m the one!’ But realistically, I’m watching it happen in real time. Making sounds and seeing that happen in the pop world. I would love to claim that I’m one of the ones pushing the boundary, but I think the boundary is just going there. Certain people are doing it first. I don’t have pressure on my art to fit a genre, I’m not signed to a label. Being independent allows me the freedom to do whatever the fuck I want.”
“I asked earlier if you wanted to be a popstar and you kind of brushed it off, but with music like Charlie’s getting this kind of fanfare; you really do have a shot,” I said. “Do you stake any claim in the rise of this sound that is so popular right now?”
“I would love to transition into something that is a bit more accessible,” they said. “Making weird stuff is cool and fun and good, but it would feel good to reach more people. I don’t like to think of myself ever as ‘inaccessible.’ I want to be able to be relatable to folks outside of a small niche community of people in a handful of cities. I think there’s a certain amount of stake that I can claim in what I’m doing and how it contributes to larger cultural trends. But honestly, I’m just part of a greater wave of consciousness, as all creative genre shifts go. You tap into something, and the people who tap in at the right moment in the right circumstances get to surf the wave we are all building.”
“So,” I began. “I really loved your video! Knowing a bit about you, it was awesome to see something so personal. Let me try and see if I got the full concept, and you can tell me if I was right. So you and your sister-wives find that your husband has killed himself, and you go on a rampage?”
“Sister-Wives Gone Wild!” they chanted. “You basically got it. A version of what you see was originally pitched to me by one of my best friends, Tanner AKA Tantron. I’ve known them since they were a tiny tiny baby. We were childhood neighbors and we both came out of Mormonism. We are both queer and deviant and therefore a match made in hell. Their original thought was a ‘colonial face-tat juxtaposition.’ I was like, ‘That sounds great!’ Tanner went on to expand the idea to include polygamy- not specifically Mormon, but definitely flavors of it. Together, we riffed, and we put together this huge team of people to make it come to life. The end product– while it is obviously my song and I am in many ways the subject– it is so much this collective vision. I saw shiversucker the music video come to life way outside of myself; the costume design, the production design, all of it. There are so many pieces that came together to make it what it is. It’s so right, the end product is so right.
“I was definitely getting a sense of anger in this piece of art, both at where you come from and the church itself,” I said.
“Yeah…” they said, losing their sweet and bubbly tone. “I have absolute unresolved anger. I’ve expressed a lot of that in the last decade and I think it’s starting to be screamed out a bit. It’s turning into something else, where I can appreciate its strangeness, while still recognizing its abuse. It was just horribly oppressive. Think about all of the ways it could be oppressive in every category. I still think the LDS organization is that, but as my anger metabolizes, I can look at my family and where I’m from and appreciate how unique it was. I also have to give credit to how it influences my brain processes. It’s given me this well of creativity that seems to be endless. The flip side of that, is that the church gave me an impenetrable wall of shame that I carry with me at all times. I am angry about that, and I think you see that very clearly in the music video. I seek to destroy. The song feels that way to me. The lyrics seek to destroy.”
“The lyrics are great!” I said. “They are hard, and gratuitously obscene in a way that would not offend a secular audience, but when paired with the video become extremely offensive to a Mormon fundamentalist audience.”
“Hell yeah!” they said, their party energy returning.
“Did you show it to your family?” I asked.
“I definitely did not share it with my [whole] family,” they said. “I did share it with one sibling who appreciated it. There have been a couple people I went to highschool with that have seen it and have reached out to me like, ‘Oh my god!’ There are definitely ex Mormons in my life who saw it and understood and reached out to me to let me know. That feels good.”
“Do you feel like you have to hide yourself from your family?”
“No, my family knows who I am at this point. I do have face tattoos after all,” they sighed. “I don’t actively share certain things with them, just knowing that it’s not for them. I know this, they know this. I do share things with them that I think they’ll appreciate, and they have gotten to a point where they express support as best they know how.”
“Are they kind of obsessed with you?” I asked, unable to fathom how they wouldn’t be. They had somehow created a creature from a totally different universe than them.
“My family?!” they said, bursting out laughing as if the notion was ridiculous. “No, not all. Sometimes if I go to an extended family gathering I feel eyes. But my family, especially my brothers, aren’t aware of what I do at all. My mom still can’t quite comprehend what I do for a living.”
“They just don’t get it?” I asked.
“They don’t get it,” they said.
“Come on though,” I said, ready to die on this hill in disbelief. “What about what you just did in Seoul? If they saw that they’d have to get that this is a thing at least.”
“Yea,” they conceded a bit. “I shared the video with my mom. She said, ‘Wow, you look so great. Your kindergarten self would be so proud!’ And that felt so good. It’s true, my kindergarten self was livingggg on that stage.”
“I notice,” I said. “That in a lot of ways you exude a sense of gratitude– whether it’s to your mom for making you compete in piano or the crew of your video. Do you think that that outlook is in some ways a product of the church, or do you think you are just inherently a grateful person.”
“It’s so interesting you point that out,” they said, pausing for a second. “I think it’s a few things. One, I am compulsively grateful and looking to share credit. I think that does come from being raised as a woman in a fundamentalist religion. I was taught to always include other people and never hog the spotlight. There’s a feeling of being afraid to claim stardom or anything that centers you. On the other hand, I think I am just a grateful person. I enjoy sharing projects and credit. I sincerely am like that. I would like to cultivate it more, an ever more positive and grateful outlook on life. Realistically, I have experienced some really intense shit in my life, capital ‘T’ Traumas, and cultivating this already present quality of gratitude and collectivity is a constructive way for me to grow as a person.”
We ended our call shortly after this, and I thought about the pervasive belief within our culture that being too generous with credit lessens our ultimate success. For some people, especially femmes, humility and gratitude can be confused for weakness. But, for Madge, I could never see it playing out like this. Whether on a screen or on a stage, they are clearly the star, and ain’t nobody gonna get that confused.