A.G. Cook

7G (2020)

7G is less a conventional album than a demonstration of range, a sprawling, multi-disc release moving between glitchy pop, ambient interludes, and straightforwardly pretty songwriting without settling into any single mode for long. "Oh Yeah" is one of the record's more accessible moments, a bright, hooky pop song that still carries the slightly uncanny, over-processed quality running through Cook's production generally. Elsewhere the record swings into much stranger territory, treating its own scale as license to try nearly everything at once. It's a useful map of A.G. Cook's actual range, released at a moment when most listeners only knew him through his work for other artists.

Sleeve notes

7G · 2020

A.G. Cook founded the PC Music label in England in the early 2010s as a home for a small group of producers pushing pop's most artificial-sounding elements — pitch-shifted vocals, overtly synthetic drums, bubblegum melodies rendered slightly uncanny — further than mainstream pop dared to. He became a close, prolific collaborator with SOPHIE and with Charli XCX, producing and co-writing across several of her mixtapes and albums as her sound moved closer to the PC Music aesthetic he'd helped define.

7G (2020), a sprawling, multi-disc solo release, functioned as a kind of statement of range, moving between genres and production styles across dozens of tracks rather than settling into a single mode. Cook has continued working prolifically both under his own name and as a producer for other artists, treating PC Music's original aesthetic less as a fixed sound than as a starting point other pop music could be built from. His influence on 2010s and 2020s pop production is considerable, even when his own name isn't the one listeners recognize.