I’m not sure where the mysterious Nares stops and 8485 starts on “Levitate”. No matter: it’s been getting heavy play in my house and car since I heard it in March. It’s gorgeous and atmospheric, melodic and memorable. And it led me to find out more about 8485, which has been a wild ride.
‘Eighty’ is a Canadian hyperpop artist who has been releasing music and affiliated with a group called Helix Tears (a hyperpop collective led by an artist called blackwinterwells) since 2020. This excellent profile in Underground Underdogs goes into detail about her origins as a guitarist and reinvention as a vocaloid-style character when she started out.
Along the way, possibly in part because of the emergence of AI as a tool of corporate destruction, she embraced her flesh and blood. In 2023 she released Personal Protocol, an album announced with a Max Headroom-via-David Lynch video and a website that feels like a PC game from 1998. The Helix Tears connection is going strong, but as she said in this Fader interview:
“I got tired of evaluating everything I did by how well it proved I was more than human. Even plague town, which came from a really emotional and naturalistic space, had to frame that space as something to escape; being Eighty was the only way out. My humanity was always such a necessary part of the process, and I had to try to access it while constantly condemning it. It was impossible to work that way.”
Personal Protocol is 7 tracks that span less than 20 minutes, mostly drum-and-bass fueled hyperpop, with lyrics that feel inspired by William Gibson. It’s unpredictable and eclectic. Lead single “COOL_DNB_SONG” sets the tone for the record:
Last year, Eighty released Software Gore, a four-track EP that takes things in wild new directions. Broken beats, distortion, found sound and chaos define this 3-song-plus-interlude arc, a cyberpunk dystopia that falls somewhere between Johnny Mnemonic and The Terminator. Each song is a collaboration, and the guest artists bring their own energy to each track. As a whole, it’s a sinister and immersive 9 minutes (only 9 minutes!).
Lead single ‘goreblog’ is frantic and weird, and it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
All the while, Eighty has been collaborating on tracks with other artists, that generally follow convention. “Levitate” is one; her latest is a collaboration with Gore girl on “I dont want to hurt him. I like him.” Only by 8485’s standards is this considered ‘conventional’, though:
Eighty’s evolution from vocaloid avatar to raw, human artist is an interesting storyline, but her glitchy, anxious, sinister sound is a cyberpunk nightmare that still feels deeply personal. I frequently reference Ted Chiang’s writing about how it takes a human to create art, and it 8485s art has taken wild and irresistible new turns since she embraced her humanity. If we’re on the verge of the AI apocalypse, at least the soundtrack is killer.
