PC Music
A.G. Cook's label was really a circle of school and university friends, with SOPHIE alongside, putting out exaggerated, candy-bright pop almost every week, then making Charli XCX's records.
- A.G. Cook
Started PC Music in June 2013 with school and Goldsmiths friends and ran it through the Columbia deal, then became Charli XCX's creative director in late 2016. He still hears SOPHIE's fingerprints on his later records.
- SOPHIE★ Named as an influence by 4 artists on the map
A close associate who never technically signed to PC Music: she played the Power Lunches basement with Cook in January 2014 and was part of QT with him, whose "Hey QT" came out on XL Recordings in August 2014.
- Charli XCX
Never on the label, but from 2016 the circle made her records: SOPHIE produced her Vroom Vroom EP, and Cook, her creative director, executive-produced Pop 2 (2017) with SOPHIE, easyFun and Lil Data.
The room
London · 2013–2017
A.G. Cook started PC Music in June 2013, around the time he graduated from Goldsmiths, and built it around people he already knew. Danny L Harle was an old school friend he met again at university; Gus Lobban, who recorded as Kane West, was a year below him at Goldsmiths; Polly-Louisa Salmon, who made records as GFOTY, was a school friend. Hannah Diamond, a former fashion and styling student who had co-founded LOGO Magazine, easyFun, Lil Data and felicita completed the circle. Caroline Polachek called it "a collective of friends" that "clearly wasn't a label in the conventional sense." From 2014 to 2015 it put out new music almost every week.
It had rooms as well as release dates. On 24 January 2014 SOPHIE and Cook played the basement of Power Lunches in Dalston, and that April Hannah Diamond gave her first live show at the Edition Hotel in central London. SOPHIE never technically signed to the label, but she worked inside the circle: with Cook, the singer Harriet Pittard and Hayden Dunham she was part of QT, whose "Hey QT" came out on XL Recordings in August 2014. From 2016 the circle's biggest room was Charli XCX's records: SOPHIE produced her Vroom Vroom EP that February, Cook became her creative director late that year, and Pop 2 (December 2017), made with him, SOPHIE, easyFun and Lil Data, was recorded mostly in Alicia Keys' old New York studio, with other sessions in London.
Room to room
No band in another scene names the bands here; 1 band from 1 other scene shaped them.
Red: who a band here shapedBlue: who a band here learned fromPoint at a band to see only its links; click a scene to go there.
- Düsseldorf–CologneA.G. Cook learned from Kraftwerk.
What came out of it
The sound later filed under hyperpop reached the wider world through Pop 2, which Pitchfork called "the best full-length work of both Charli and PC Music's respective careers," and through SOPHIE, whom Charli named at the 2025 BRIT Awards as someone "none of us would be up here without." PC Music itself put out new music until 2023 and has released only archival records since. On this map Slayyyter and Ninajirachi name SOPHIE as an influence, and Cook traces his own influences back to Kraftwerk.
