Who Are 100 Gecs? And Why Are They The Biggest Band On The Internet?
100 Gecs are about to tour Australia, and have previously collaborated with Charli XCX and Rico Nasty. But who are the duo, and how did they get so famous?
Gone are the days of billboards and advertising tie-ins — these days, if you want to be a massive pop star, you’ve got to pivot to memes. And no band exemplifies that change in the industry better than 100 Gecs.
On paper, there is nothing about 100 Gecs that should inspire anything like a mainstream following. Two decades ago, the band would be, at most, cult stars — obscure weirdos like Suicide or The Frogs, most famous when name-checked by other, more commercially successful musicians.
Instead, 100 Gecs are bonafide pop stars. They recently collaborated with Charli XCX and Rico Nasty. They’re in the process of embarking on a world tour, one bringing them down to Australia in a few short months. And their music videos rack up millions of views.
But who are the duo, and what do they have to tell us about the contemporary music industry?
Who Are 100 Gecs?
100 Gecs are an experimental duo made up of friends Dylan Brady and Laura Les. Active since 2015, the pair make their music by sending files to each other long distance, meeting up to tour and film their music videos.
Openly inspired by abrasive noise musician John Zorn — an artist famous for his 30-second long spears of ugly, hostile feedback — the pair’s songs are notable for their sudden tonal left-turns. ‘Money Machine’, their most famous single, begins as an auto-tuned hip hop ditty, before falling out of step with itself and slowly morphing into a hideous mess of reverb and musique concrète.
There’s some irony at play, of course. The ‘Money Machine’ music video trades on the tropes established by YouTube clout rappers, with the pair dancing around a pristine GMC truck.
But the most striking thing about 100 Gecs is how sincere they are about their music. They’re closer in tone to weirdo auteur Gary Wilson than they are irony-poisoned memelords. Their idiosyncrasies don’t appear to be born out of a desire for attention as much as they feel like a truthful, important form of expression.
Indeed, it’s that mix between the ultra-sincere and the artfully subversive that has led in part to the band’s huge popularity. People come to the band because their music is attention-grabbing in its oddness. But they stay with the band because of the music’s humanity.
How Did The Band Get So Big?
Key to the 100 Gecs story is the rise in popularity of Facebook meme groups. Online sub-cultures like Patrician Music Chartposting, a Facebook group born out of a Death Grips fanpage, now boast many thousands of members.
Moreover, these digital communities tend to rally around key avant-garde musicians — face-melting noise pioneers My Bloody Valentine, pop weirdos Talking Heads, multi-coloured chameleons Ween — and so celebrate any contemporary musician in the same vein.
Wide-eyed, singing clone Poppy, spiky dance-punk polymaths Car Seat Headrest, art-punk meanies Black Midi, 100 Gecs — all these acts owe at least some of their success to the rising influence of these Facebook meme groups. Bands that would otherwise spend years trying to cultivate a fanbase can now find one instantly, if the singles are good enough.
Often, that meme group attention leads to the attention of Anthony Fantano, AKA the Needle Drop, one of the most watched YouTube critics on the planet. And that’s how it went in the case of 100 Gecs. Fantano liked the band’s self-titled debut, giving it a handsome Light 7 out of ten. But it wasn’t even the rating that mattered. The video got under a third of a million views, and the band were established as one to watch.
Similarly important is the phenomena of YouTube reaction videos. Reaction videos are an industry in and of themselves, with established brands shining a spotlight on any emerging musician in the form of a tongue-in-cheek rib of their music. The stranger the song, the more likely it’s going to inspire some big-name YouTuber to watch it, eyes wide, gently making jokes at the video-maker’s expense, and exposing them to thousands of new listeners in the process.
Sometimes, that ribbing can feel cruel, particularly when the musician doesn’t seem aware of their own oddness. Just look at the career trajectory of one Unkle Adams, an utterly sincere rapper and inspirational speaker who found himself the butt of internet jokes that he wasn’t in on.
But in the case of 100 Gecs, the band seem accepting of every interpretation of their songs. Susan Sontag once described camp as being “alive to every possible way things could be taken”; that’s the secret weapon of 100 Gecs too.
And that’s the reason you haven’t heard the last of them yet.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @Joseph_O_Earp.