100 gecs ‘10,000 gecs’ Review: In-Your-Face, Maximalist Pop to the Nth Degree

100 gec’s debut album, 1000 gecs, was a watershed moment in contemporary pop, featuring 10 incredibly silly, eccentric, genre-mashing, and, above all else, catchy songs. The 2019 album was a succinct encapsulation of our internet-obsessed, irony-pilled era that was also turbulent enough to serve as the perfect soundtrack for our increasingly precarious times. In short, nothing else sounded quite like it, and very little has come close in its wake despite countless copycats who have tried to recreate its lighting-in-a-bottle energy.

For those who were apprehensive at the thought of these hyperpop forebearers following up on that level of creative ingenuity with equally successful results, those fears are laid to rest on their latest, 10,000 gecs. If anything, the irreverent musical disorder that mischievous masterminds Dylan Brady and Laura Les whip up has only gotten more in-your-face.

Opening on the high-frequency crescendo of the THX Deep Note before barreling into a heavy-metal riff—followed by a series of punchy, distorted bass lines—10,000 gecs wastes no time kicking things into a heterogeneous high gear. The remainder of the first track, “Dumbest Girl Alive,” which finds Les belting in her trademark squeal of a voice, eventually heads way into a quieter acoustic guitar section before closing on some more deafening shredding.

From there, the album, like 1000 gecs before it, finds inventive ways to cover a lot of stylistic ground across its concise 27 minutes. This ranges from the likes of Limp Bizkit-inspired nü-metal on “Billy Knows Jamie” to “The Most Wanted Person in the United States,” which suggests Beck’s “Loser” if it were loaded with cartoonish “boing” sound effects and lyrics about Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis, as Les so eloquently puts it here, “suckin’ on my penis.” But these descriptions hardly convey the impressive amount of micro-idiosyncrasies the songs, which are frequently as disorienting as they are oddly tuneful, are able to slip in.

Even the thinnest material here, like the avant-garde “One Million Dollars,” which really doesn’t amount to much more than a small footnote in the album’s sequencing, continues to play with our expectations regarding what “music” is in the first place. Utilizing TikTok’s Text-to-Speech function, the sketch of a track starts off with a computerized voice repeating the phrase “one million dollars.” For the remaining two minutes, it progressively gets more deranged as clangorous electric guitars and a volatile drum machine enter into the mix, all while the track’s automated vocal passage remains seemingly oblivious to the ensuing chaos unfurling around it.

“I Got My Tooth Removed,” one of the broader swings that the group takes on 10,000 gecs, starts off as a sincere ballad aimed at an unnamed “asshole” before it transforms into a full-on ska-punk number. The song’s first part becomes recontextualized, as the “asshole” in question was actually just a tooth that needed to be removed. While the track functions as an entertaining non sequitur with an exceptionally sticky chorus, it’s one of the few instances on 10,000 gecs where Brady and Les lean a bit too heavily on novelty.

Likewise, “Frog on the Floor,” a total lark of a song about an amphibian who “gets the party jumping” by telling “croaks” instead of jokes, is so knowingly goofy and laidback that it feels like a small road bump on the way the album’s next “real” song rather than a natural progression of the duo’s musical interests. Still, it’s hard to get all that angry at a track where the lead vocalists are literally laughing through their verses, and which wraps up before tedium can ever settle in.

For as ostensibly random and wacky as their music first seems, Brady and Les can still cram in a lot of insanely catchy melodies into these erratic assortments of noises. Tracks such as “Hollywood Baby,” “Doritos & Fritos,” and “MeMeMe” are all euphoria-filled rides that drill deep into the recesses of your subconscious, and rank as some of the best singles the group has released yet. After all, where else are you going to hear lyrics where “Cheetos, Doritos, and Fritos” are expertly rhymed with “mosquitos,” “burritos,” and “Danny DeVito”?

Out of those three bangers, though, “MeMeMe” ranks as both 100 gecs’s greatest stab at sincerity and their most mature statement to date. The track implicitly deals with the parasocial realities between the group’s cult-like fanbase—claiming they’ll never really “know, know-know-know, know-know-know anything about me, me-me-me, me-me-me”—and explicitly deals with its members struggling to connect with others in their day-to-day lives.

In particular, Les’s verse about embracing her true inner self, sung without the use of Auto-Tune (which she’s previously utilized to help mitigate her voice dysphoria), is about as empowering as a 100 gecs song can get. It’s small and significant moments such as those that help substantiate the claim that, while the twosome’s rambunctious revelry may appear wholly flippant upon first listen, their music, and 10,000 gecs as a whole, is far more sophisticated than it seems.