100 Gecs Started Their First Album for a Minecraft Festival

In January 2019 Dylan Brady and Laura Les made some music to play at a festival held inside Minecraft. The set was called the Fire Festival, the venue was a video game, and the material they wrote for it became the basis of 1000 Gecs, the album now routinely described as the first mainstream hyperpop record.

It came out on Dog Show Records on 31 May 2019, ran twenty-three minutes, and changed what a certain kind of pop production was allowed to sound like. The circumstances of its making explain almost everything about it.

Eighty Per Cent by Email

Brady was in Los Angeles. Les was in Chicago. Roughly eighty per cent of the album was assembled by sending Logic Pro X files back and forth, with each of them adding new elements to whatever arrived.

The revealing part is Brady’s account of the method, which is that they did not really talk about what they wanted to do. There was no brief and no agreed direction; one person would add something and post it back. Les has described the process as an exquisite corpse, after the surrealist parlour game where each contributor extends a drawing while seeing only the last fragment of it.

That is a genuinely unusual way to make pop music, and it accounts for the quality every reviewer noticed. Jon Caramanica of the New York Times observed that the songs shift gears dozens of times, which is what happens structurally when two people take turns adding to a file without agreeing where it is going.

A Closet in Chicago

Les recorded her vocals in a closet, and pitched them up throughout in the nightcore style, because at the time she could not listen to her own recorded voice as a result of gender dysphoria.

The processed vocal became the single most recognisable element of the record and then of the genre around it, copied widely by people for whom it was purely an aesthetic choice. Its origin was a practical accommodation, which is a common enough story in recording history and rarely as consequential as this one.

Ten Tracks, Twenty-Three Minutes

The album is short and the songs are shorter. 745 Sticky opens at two twenty-one, Money Machine runs one fifty-four, I Need Help Immediately barely passes a minute. Stupid Horse, Ringtone, GecGecGec, Hand Crushed by a Mallet and Gec 2 Ü fill out a record that is over in less time than a single side of most albums released that year.

The influences the pair have cited make the same point about refusing hierarchy: YouTube, Cannibal Corpse, John Zorn, nightcore as a concept, Soulja Boy, Paramore, Chiodos. The genre labels applied to the results ran to post-dubstep, indie pop, pop punk, trance, chiptune, happy hardcore, hip hop, synth-pop, ska and Europop, frequently within the same song.

Why a Video Game Was the Right Venue

The Minecraft booking looks like a novelty until you consider what it demanded. A set performed inside a game has no room acoustics, no sightlines and no physical crowd to read, so none of the usual instincts about pacing a live show apply. What it does have is an audience already accustomed to compressed audio, sudden transitions and things happening faster than they would in the physical world.

Writing for those conditions rewards exactly the qualities the album became known for: extremely short songs, abrupt gear changes and a mix that survives bad speakers. The debut sounds the way it does partly because its first audience was going to hear it through a laptop while standing in a block-built field.

It also placed the pair outside the venue circuit that normally shapes a new act. A band that spends two years playing small rooms learns to write for those rooms. 100 gecs learned to write for a server, and by the time they reached real stages the material had already been built to work without any of the things a stage provides.

How It Was Received

Pitchfork gave 7.4 and called it one of the year’s most fascinating and exhilarating experimental pop albums. AllMusic gave four and a half stars. Both Jon Caramanica and Jon Pareles put it in their New York Times albums of the year, at one and at ten respectively.

Commercially it behaved like the self-released record it was, reaching ninety-four on US Top Current Albums, seven on Heatseekers and thirty-six on Independent Albums. Those are small numbers attached to an album that reorganised a genre, which is the usual pattern for records that matter to producers before they matter to buyers.

The Major-Label Version

10,000 Gecs arrived on 17 March 2023 through Dog Show and Atlantic, again produced entirely by the pair. Ten tracks in twenty-six minutes: Dumbest Girl Alive, 757, Hollywood Baby, Frog on the Floor, Doritos & Fritos, Billy Knows Jamie, One Million Dollars, The Most Wanted Person in the United States, I Got My Tooth Removed and mememe.

It scored 81 on Metacritic, with 8.2 from Pitchfork, five stars from NME and four from the Guardian. Reviewers noted the palette had widened again to take in nu-metal, pop punk, nineties alt-funk and ska. It reached fifty-nine on the Billboard 200 and ten on Top Rock and Alternative Albums.

The interesting thing is what did not change. A major label acquired a duo whose method was emailing project files to each other and whose songs average two and a half minutes, and the follow-up was three minutes longer than the debut with the same production credits. Nobody was brought in.

Met at a Rodeo

The origin story is as unlikely as the Minecraft set. Brady, from Kirkwood, and Les, from Webster Groves, met at a rodeo while at high school in the St. Louis area, reconnected at a house party in 2012, and began working together in the winter of 2015. The first 100 gecs EP followed in July 2016.

Three years passed between that EP and the debut album, which is a long apprenticeship for a group whose music sounds improvised. Some of that time was spent apart in different cities, which is how the remote method became the working method rather than a compromise.

Playing to Arenas Now

In 2025 they supported My Chemical Romance on the Long Live The Black Parade tour, which is a strange and appropriate destination. A band that made an album for a Minecraft server now opens for one of the largest rock acts of the previous two decades, in front of audiences who did not arrive for deconstructed club music.

It is a version of the argument Ladytron have been making by releasing at their own pace for twenty-five years: an act with a fully formed method does not need to adjust it to move up a tier. The rooms changed. The Logic files still go back and forth.

What remains genuinely rare about the pair is that the innovation was structural rather than sonic. Plenty of producers have made abrasive, fast, genre-collapsing pop. Very few arrived at it by removing the conversation about what the song was supposed to be, and none of the imitators can copy that part, because it is not a sound.