On Saturday, September 12, six days before London experimental-pop artist A.G. Cook released his album Apple, the founder of label and collective PC Music assembled more than 20 like-minded acts for a livestream festival called Appleville. Hosted by a custom website with an embedded Twitch stream, this self-described “tribute to live computer music” starred Cook, kaleidoscopic indie trio Kero Kero Bonito, bedroom-pop phenom Clairo, irreverent dance duo 100 Gecs, and bona fide pop star Charli XCX (who’d hired Cook to be her creative director in 2016). They represented a cross-section of a largely online underground scene with an international audience that skews heavily Gen Z. And if you clicked in during the first hour, you got to see one of that scene’s newest darlings: Chicago-based artist Fraxiom, singing to an audience for just the second time ever while they swayed from foot to foot in front of a crude green screen made by hanging up a tablecloth from Party City.

Since it came out in February, the cheeky, mercurial single has made Fraxiom and Gupi stars in the admittedly tiny hyperpop universe. Atop a driving house beat accented with blown-out hi-hats, Gupi rotates through a whimsical menu of squelching synths, changing the track’s mood so often that it’s impossible to get comfortable with any one of them. Fraxiom matches the shifts in the instrumental with a saucy performance full of deadpan raps and frazzled Auto-Tune outbursts; they name-check Caroline Polachek, reference a crazed 100 Gecs show at New York University, and tell off Elon Musk, DJ Zedd, and Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson. “Thos Moser” has racked up respectable numbers, considering the size of its niche—just shy of 350,000 YouTube views and more than a million Spotify streams.

  • The video for Gupi and Fraxiom’s “Thos Moser”

Fraxiom grew up in Kingston, Massachusetts, just outside Plymouth and less than an hour south of Boston. In high school they sought out outre pop, video-game music, and similar sounds through Soundcloud and Datafruits.fm, a U.S.-based Internet radio station specializing in Japanese indie music. Fraxiom was particularly drawn to nightcore, an electronic subgenre that “remixes” recognizable pop songs by slightly speeding them up (and often not much more).

  • A brand-new Fraxiom track, produced by Umru and Gupi

They didn’t collaborate on music at first. Gupi had a couple roommates his freshman year, and he felt self-conscious about working on bizarre pop music around them. “I just felt like a nuisance, making music with another person in there, even though it would have been fine,” he says. “But imagine the music we’re making and then imagine, like, Berklee students in the same room.”

The artists in Fraxiom’s circle share the kind of offbeat sense of humor you’d expect from people who make pop music so deliberately askew. “I think that’s sort of why we became friends,” Pooldad says. “We just want to make jokes really hard.”

Feeling Cool And Normal by fraxiom