100 Gecs

100 gecs: How Two Kids from St. Louis Rewired Pop’s Circuitry

100 gecs — the hyperpop duo from St. Louis, Missouri — are Dylan Brady and Laura Les, two producers who built an entirely new genre logic from discarded internet aesthetics.
Formed in 2015, the group operates at the intersection of hyperpop, experimental pop, electropop, electronic rock, and pop-punk.
Their catalog spans barely two full-length studio records, yet those records reconfigured what listeners and critics considered possible within the pop frame — pushing distortion ceilings, collapsing genre fences, and making the act of aesthetic chaos feel structurally deliberate. With over 500,000 listeners tracked across the Get Music catalog and a sophomore album that landed on year-end lists at Pitchfork, Stereogum, and NME simultaneously, 100 gecs have graduated from cult provocation to critical consensus without softening a single sidechain transient.

Formation, Early Work, and the Architecture of Noise

Dylan Brady and Laura Les first met in 2012. They started making music together in the winter of 2015, when Brady met Les in Chicago, where they officially formed 100 gecs and worked on their eponymous EP.

That EP was self-released on July 12, 2016.
The name itself was never resolved into clean meaning —
the origin of “100 gecs” is unclear, as Brady and Les have given several contradictory explanations, including that they saw the name spray painted on a dorm building in Chicago, that both saw different words in their dreams and combined them, or that “gec” is an abbreviation for “getting exceptionally calm.”
The ambiguity is fitting. 100 gecs have always been more interested in productive confusion than legible branding.

For a time, they both continued to work on their solo releases while also producing for others.

Laura Les, previously known under the moniker osno1, is an American music producer, singer, and songwriter best known as one half of the duo.
Brady’s production instincts were shaped by a similarly broad appetite — trap, emo, grindcore, and chiptune all factor into his engineering decisions without any apparent hierarchy. What made their union distinctive from the start was a shared refusal to treat genre selection as a curatorial act. For 100 gecs, genre is raw material, not identity.

Despite plans to record more music, they were unable to find enough time until they performed a “breakout” DJ set together for the 2019 Minecraft Fire Festival.
That performance became a small legend in online music communities — a live set inside a video game environment that felt entirely coherent with their aesthetic framework.
Following that collaboration, they continued to work on songs and released their debut album, 1000 gecs, on May 31, 2019, to positive reviews.
The album ran 23 minutes and contained ten tracks. In those 23 minutes, Brady and Les established a production language that nobody had a tidy label for: blown-out bass drums, nightcored vocals pitched into the upper register of uncanny-valley affect, trance arpeggios running against ska rhythms, and digital distortion applied as a compositional tool rather than an accident.
Their track “800db cloud” begins as an abrasive electronic song and ends with a brutal grindcore breakdown
— a move that reads less as provocation and more as structural curiosity, two producers testing what a listener’s ear will accept if the transition is quick enough.

Discography: Three Releases, One Expanding Argument

1000 gecs is the debut studio album by 100 gecs, released on May 31, 2019, through Dog Show Records, with Brady and Les handling all production.

Featuring an experimental sound that combined several genres, 1000 gecs was well received by critics and placed on several publications’ lists of the best albums of 2019.
The album’s lead single, “Money Machine,” arrived two days before the album and established the duo’s commercial logic: a track simultaneously too abrasive and too catchy to dismiss, built around Les’s pitch-shifted vocal and a drop structured like a broken browser tab.
Produced over the internet with Brady in Los Angeles and Les back in Missouri, the album is truly anarchic — a combination of pop, noise, trance, punk, ska, and metal, with Les’s voice pitched up into uncanny territory and no one sound hanging around for more than a couple of seconds before jolting into something else.

1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues, the companion remix album, was released on July 10, 2020, through Dog Show, Big Beat, and Atlantic, running over 51 minutes.

Les and Brady released the stems for their debut album for their fans and friends to run wild with, which boasts features from high-flyers A.G. Cook and Injury Reserve, while also giving a platform to gifted, underground producers among their fans.

The “Ringtone” remix features vocals from Charli XCX, Rico Nasty, and Sarah Bonito of Kero Kero Bonito.
The Tree of Clues functions as both a community document and a statement about authorship — a record that argued, implicitly, that 100 gecs’ aesthetic was a platform others could build on, not a closed system.
100 gecs signed with Atlantic Records in 2020
, formalizing a major-label relationship that would frame their second full-length.

That second studio album, 10,000 gecs (2023), is available in the Get Music catalog and represents the clearest articulation yet of what Brady and Les are actually building.
Released through Dog Show and Atlantic Records, 10,000 gecs is the duo’s first release on a major label.

In December 2022, the duo released an EP titled Snake Eyes, which included the previously performed “Hey Big Man” as well as two other songs
, signaling the coming campaign. At 26 minutes and 53 seconds, the album condenses pop-punk riffing, ska upstrokes, nü-metal bass, and hyperpop production into a runtime that feels both complete and deliberately insufficient — designed to be replayed rather than settled into.
It peaked at number 59 on the US Billboard 200, number 4 on US Top Alternative Albums, number 8 on US Top Rock Albums, and number 89 on the Australian ARIA chart.

Geographic Reception and the Online Scene That Made Them

100 gecs are, in the most literal sense, an internet band. Their early circulation happened entirely through SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and Twitter discourse —
this fervent fan base is best attributed to the idiosyncratic sound of Laura and Dylan’s dual project, with blown-out bass drums, nightcored vocals, trance arpeggios, internet trends, and cartoonish soundtracks all finding a fitting home on their debut album.
That organic online growth preceded any formal label infrastructure, which means their audience was self-organizing around the music rather than being delivered to it by radio add campaigns or algorithmic playlist placement.

Chart geography on 10,000 gecs confirms what streaming patterns suggested: the duo index strongly in Anglo-American markets —
peaking at number 59 on the US Billboard 200, number 4 on US Top Alternative Albums, number 49 on UK Album Downloads (OCC), and number 5 on US Vinyl Albums
— while also registering meaningful chart presence in continental Europe, with
a peak of number 17 on the Hungarian Albums chart
, a market where experimental electronic music has a historically engaged press and live circuit. The vinyl chart position is particularly telling: number 5 on US Vinyl Albums suggests a collector audience investing in physical format alongside streaming, which maps onto the duo’s early Bandcamp fanbase, a community that monetizes before it streams.

The UK reception carries its own logic. British audiences arrived early via the hyperpop pipeline — the XL Recordings-adjacent milieu around A.G. Cook and PC Music gave UK listeners a framework for understanding what Brady and Les were doing that American rock and pop radio could not easily provide. The “Ringtone” remix’s pairing of Charli XCX — a transatlantic figure who straddles UK and US pop scenes — with Rico Nasty and Kero Kero Bonito’s Sarah Bonito created a geographic and genre coalition that widened the duo’s reach without diluting their aesthetic position.
The song’s production is glitchy with “80s video game-inspired blips” and uses heavy bass and Auto-Tune
, a sonic vocabulary that registers as both nostalgic and contemporary depending on the listener’s reference points.

They are recognized globally for spearheading the hyperpop movement, delivering high-energy tracks that merge pop-punk vocals with glitchy electronic production and internet culture aesthetics.
Their live performances — including festival appearances across North America and Europe — have expanded that reach into physical venue contexts, where the gap between their maximalist production and conventional stage presentation creates its own friction and appeal.

Critical Legacy: Serious About the Absurd

The most telling fact about 100 gecs’ critical standing is that their two studio albums generated the same Metacritic score:
10,000 gecs received “universal acclaim” with a weighted average of 81 out of 100 from fifteen critic scores, and a Pitchfork rating of 8.2 out of 10.

1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues also holds a Metacritic score of 81 out of 100 based on 7 reviews, indicating “universal acclaim.”
The consistency is almost suspicious — two records from a duo that operates by anti-consistency, and both land in the same critical bandwidth. What that number actually reveals is a press corps reaching the same conclusion by different argumentative routes: that 100 gecs are doing something formally significant that cannot be explained away as novelty.

Pitchfork’s review of 10,000 gecs described the album as
“something like astral projection, allowing you to ever-so-briefly shake off the constant doom scroll of life for a hot second of unencumbered fun.”
Variety went further:
“100 gecs pack more ideas into 23 minutes than most artists who release 70+-minute-long albums” and “with ‘10,000 Gecs,’ the duo has reached a ‘South Park’ level of brilliant absurdity.”
Kerrang! engaged with the structural ambition directly, noting that
the record “feels like the next building-block in a potentially genre-defining body of work.”
The year-end placement data supports that reading:
10,000 gecs appeared at number 18 on Pitchfork’s 50 Best Albums of 2023, number 10 on Stereogum’s list, and number 14 on NME’s.

The critical argument around 100 gecs has matured significantly since 2019, when some outlets treated them as an internet joke whose appeal would expire.
Being funny was never expressly a goal on 1000 gecs, but the shots of humor peppered throughout the album reflect a mindset Brady and Les cultivated during their early internet years: “We’re just not trying to be serious as hard as some people.”
That distinction matters. The humor in 100 gecs is a byproduct of formal decision-making — a consequence of building tracks out of incompatible genre materials and running them at maximum gain — not a substitute for craft. Critics who engaged with the production specifics rather than the aesthetic surface found a duo with genuine command of compression, register, and structural tension.

The more durable critical question is what comes next.
Brady and Les, friends for years after growing up in the same St. Louis orbit, had been making fascinating music apart for years, under their own names and various pseudonyms
, which means each brings a solo production vocabulary into the room. The duo format contains their instincts but also compounds them — two producers who both push toward extremity, each checking and amplifying the other. Whether a third studio album extends the studio runtime, pulls back the distortion ceiling, or introduces an entirely new reference system is genuinely unpredictable. That unpredictability is not a liability. It is, at this point, the central critical asset of the 100 gecs catalog.
“More than that, it’s proof once again that there’s no one like 100 gecs.”

Frequently Asked Questions

Where should I start with 100 gecs’ catalog?

10,000 gecs (2023) is the most produced and sonically varied entry point — a 26-minute record that indexes their full genre range, from nü-metal to ska to hyperpop, within a single sitting. From there, 1000 gecs (2019) provides the origin coordinates: rawer, more confrontational in timbre, and arguably more urgent in its formal proposals. The remix companion 1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues (2020) works best after you know the source material.

Is 100 gecs still active?

As of 2026, the group remains active on Big Beat Records and Atlantic Records while maintaining their independent imprint, Dog Show Records.

Their current lineup consists solely of founders Dylan Brady and Laura Les, who share equal creative control over all aspects of their work.
Both members have continued to produce for other artists between album cycles, keeping their individual techniques sharp.

Who has 100 gecs collaborated with?

Associated acts include Charli XCX, Dorian Electra, Fall Out Boy, Rico Nasty, Kero Kero Bonito, and A.G. Cook.
The “Ringtone” remix brought Charli XCX, Rico Nasty, and Kero Kero Bonito’s Sarah Bonito together on a single track.
They have also remixed Linkin Park’s “One Step Closer” and Basement Jaxx’s “Where’s My Head At_.”
Brady has produced solo credits for Rico Nasty, and Les has maintained an active solo production practice under her own name.

Which artists sound similar to 100 gecs?

Listeners drawn to 100 gecs’ genre-collision logic will likely find common ground with A.G. Cook (whose PC Music productions share the duo’s synthetic pop hyperrealism), Dorian Electra (maximalist production, pop-punk vocal register), Charli XCX’s experimental material, and Kero Kero Bonito’s structural irreverence. Within the Get Music catalog, the 100 gecs artist page provides direct access to related release data and catalog navigation.