A.G. Cook cuts a pretty intimidating figure when NME speaks to him from New York. The founder of PC Music is prone to uninterrupted monologues that pinball between music, history, art, and life from sentence to sentence. But Cook is also disarmingly cordial, which makes keeping up with him exhausting but exciting, like competing in all ten sports of a decathlon at the same time.
Is it any surprise he’s just released a three-disc, 24-track album? You can thank his 2020 debut ‘7G’ (a whopping seven discs, 49 tracks) for paving the road to his newest record’s structure. “It was clear I had figured out a pathway for the combination of stuff I wanted to do,” he tells NME. “Now that I’ve done this, can I dig deeper?”
Digging deeper meant evaluating the gargantuan legacy of PC Music after the label announced they would cease publishing original material after ten years of activity. In that time, the label released music by Cook, Danny L Harle, SOPHIE, Hannah Diamond and more. As he reflected on his past, the uncertain future of pop, and the paradoxes that lay in between, it seemed there was only one word to name his new album: “I’m always very interested in any music that has a dialogue with itself. For me, ‘Britpop’ has that as a word”.
The idea for ‘Britpop’ began in small-town Montana during the pandemic. Isolated from his home country, Cook became “hypersensitive” to the oddities of British culture: “You’d find a book and it would talk about the history of England, but written almost as a kind of fiction. There’s a lot of intrigue and mystery towards this ancient place. It’s very idealised, even though there aren’t nice things about it too.”
Cook recalled PC Music was similarly seen as a distinctly “British, eccentric movement” in its early days. “We obviously hadn’t thought of ourselves as that, but everything from the accents to this collage experimentation would be considered by US audiences as quite British.”
Not only is ‘Brit’ a highly-contested term due to its potential jingoistic implications, the idea of ‘pop’ is just as unstable thanks to the Internet, the perfect breeding ground for subcultures like PC Music to thrive outside the mainstream whilst maintaining its own cult popularity. It’s why in an alternate universe where he stayed in London, “I doubt I would call an album ‘Britpop’ – I would have been too aware of how loaded it is.”
In Montana, Cook noticed the parallels in American and British forms of storytelling, and created ‘Britpop Lore’ to capture that uncanniness. Cook’s otherworldly history spans over 3000 years, all of it blurring and glitching together in the ‘Soulbreaker’ video: “I didn’t want to go too heavy handed into world building – I enjoy that, but it’s the atmosphere of ambiguity that is personally more interesting.”
It wasn’t until Cook decided to split the album into ‘Past’, ‘Present’ and ‘Future’ sections where it started to take shape. “Not only is it an eyeroll nod to the ‘90s genre, but it gives a sense of different eras and the idea of Britain as a super old place that’s trying to be futuristic,” he explains. “I started to think about my headspace in 2012 and PC Music being labelled this futuristic thing, even though I’m genuinely very interested in the present.”
“I’ve always really believed that, and I think that’s why a lot of the music that survives from that specific era is stuff that’s engaged in that way,” Cook continues. “That attitude is what I really associate with a lot of [PC] Music, rather than a sound palette like bass or sped-up vocals. It’s the tracks that are part of something cultural – at least in my mind – that have aged well.”
That thesis has been challenged recently thanks to Camila Cabello’s newest song ‘I LUV IT’, and Cook gives a small chuckle of acknowledgement when the song is brought up. The Miami popstar sparked furious debate due to her heavy use of stereotypical hyperpop sounds, with one social media user comparing it to “a bad impression of a Charli XCX song”.
Does Cook worry the sound of PC Music might outlast its philosophy? He responds that the “water cycle” between the mainstream and the underground is a conversation he’s “very interested” in, elaborating: “Every aesthetic that’s considered cool is put on a mood board and used for something. That example is a very literal one. That kind of lifting can work really nicely, but not when you see the janky cut and paste.”
Along with Charli, Cook points to 100 Gecs as artists who have successfully borrowed from hyperpop’s aesthetic whilst engaging with its attitude, adding: “They’ve not only put the work in, but they really embody a lot of the spirit and playfulness. It’s more American, but a big reason why they stood out is because they’re involved with what’s actually going on in the present.”
You might have noticed listening to ‘Britpop’ that there’s few guests to be found. Though Cook’s past credits include Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, ‘Britpop’ features Charli as its most prominent guest. She appears on the record’s eponymous track and on ‘Lucifer’ in the record’s ‘Future’ disc, which was ironically written years ago.
According to Cook, ‘Lucifer’ spawned from the era when the pair were writing Charli’s albums ‘How I’m Feeling Now’ and ‘Crash’ simultaneously. “In the non-pandemic timeline, ‘Crash’ might have come out first, and ‘How I’m Feeling Now’ would have been the weirdo album in response to ‘Crash’, which is quite interesting,” he recalls.
“Obviously everything changed, but ‘Lucifer’ would have been suitable for the version [‘HIFN’] was. We would jump between these styles and approaches and have them both in our minds.” The “uncanny, strange” sound of Lucifer, with Charli singing in Cook’s vocal range, felt like a perfect fit for the album’s liminal atmosphere.
Cook also started to develop his own voice on the ‘Present’ tracks, calling them “an effort to sing as myself”. “It’s funny,” he muses. “When I’ve worked with someone for a long time, I have this moment where their vocal range or style is still in my head, I have to take a moment to wash that off.” Unlike the ‘Past’ songs that were recorded closer to the album’s release date and the ‘Future’ tracks, which were often older A.G. songs, the ‘Present’ songs are the most immediate cuts on the album, most being recorded shortly after Cook wrote them.
His process of preserving that rawness informs the track ‘Without’, inspired by the loss of SOPHIE. The progenitor of hyperpop died unexpectedly in January 2021; in recent months, a swathe of tribute tracks have been released, including Caroline Polachek’s ‘I Believe’, Charli’s upcoming ‘So I’, and St. Vincent’s more recent verse in ‘Sweetest Fruit’.
“SOPHIE is so well known within a certain bubble and so clearly valued,” says Cook of the wave of tributes. “But at a mainstream level, there’s still a lot of work to be done. I hope this isn’t the cut-off point where everyone delivers their tributes and goes home – hopefully it’s part of a genuine acknowledgement that will reach more people.”
Nowhere is Cook’s ‘Present’ approach more poignant than towards the end of ‘Without’. Whilst writing ‘Without’, Cook heard something in the instrumental that caught his ear: “I suddenly noticed that the chord progression was similar to ‘Bipp’”. You can now hear Cook interpolate SOPHIE’s unforgettable refrain, made all the more haunting with his tender croon: “I can make you feel better – if you let me…”
It’s the process of making ‘Without’ that demonstrates what makes Cook such an enduring, madcap innovator and what will carry the legacy of PC Music forward: carefully absorbing the present and all its fortuitous coincidences. “It’s a big part of making music in the first place. Anyone working on a computer and trying to make music, you have to set all these funny limitations to make something.
“But at the same time, it’s so easy to do almost anything,” he adds. “Anything can happen.”
A. G. Cook’s ‘Britpop’ is out now
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