By Cameron Rubner
If you clicked on this article without hearing about or knowing who 100 gecs is, it’s my honor to introduce you to them.
100 gecs is an electro-pop duo consisting of St. Louis natives Laura Les and Dylan Brady. But calling them just an electric pop duo doesn’t even come remotely close to describing their sound.
The best way I can put it is that they turn pop music on its head and beat the living piss out of it with a baseball bat decked in rusty nails.
Their music seems to pull influence from almost every genre, metal, dubstep, ska, techno, pop-punk, hard rock, you name it.
Les and Brady met at a party in 2012, but they didn’t start working together until Brady went out to visit Les in Chicago where she attended university, to work on the first 100 gecs EP simply titled “100 gecs.”
That EP was released in 2017 and they started to gain a small but significant following. It wasn’t till this past May when they released their debut album “1000 gecs” that the duo started to make a lot of noise, literally and figuratively.
This album brought them closer to audiences across the country and gave listeners an earful of extreme autotune and huge Logic files that had people saying “I need more of whatever this is.”
Brady and Les don’t actually physically work together, Les is still based in Chicago and Brady is located in LA but they collaborate by sending files back and forth to each other and adding their own spin to them each time. The final result sounds like some sort of catchy acid flashback from hell.
They’re currently finishing up a tour with Brockhampton and Slowthai. Now, most Brockhampton fans and 100 gecs fans don’t exactly intersect.
I asked one of our own contributors at The Chic Daily who attended the Phoenix show, Jack Wu, who admitted he had never heard of them until then.
“It was one of the most headbanging, moshy, atmospheres I’ve ever experienced,” Wu said. “I don’t know another way to describe it but they were very interactive with the crowd,”
I also asked a 100 gecs fan who attended the same show about his point of view that night.
Photos by Kevin Weinhold
He told me there was about 25 to 30 gec fans there and gave me some insight into the clash of fanbases.
“From what I saw everyone was like ‘what is this music’ I loved seeing that because they were mostly all ‘vsco girls’ and ‘flower boy’ type [people] so it was funny seeing their reaction when all the gec fans were screaming every lyric to the songs. Me included.”
100 gecs, admittedly, isn’t for everyone right off the bat. It might take a few listens to comprehend what exactly it is you’re listening to.
Hopefully, this article inspires you to check out some of their tunes, what they’re doing in pop music is almost unprecedented. Their genre-blending sound puts people who say they listen to all kinds of music to the test.
It’s not quite so easy on the ears but if you’re looking for something outside of the ordinary and into the extreme, 100 gecs might just be what’s been missing from your playlists.
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