Halfway through 2023, the experimental-pop label PC Music announced it would stop releasing new music by the end of the year. The news came as a surprise, after a busy 2022 and as the glossy, mischievous hyperpop sound it helped develop was becoming as mainstream as ever (even Beyoncé dabbled with it on Renaissance). Moving forward, the label planned to focus on “archival projects and special reissues.”
Then, on January 1, 2024, PC founder A.G. Cook released the sprawling, ten-minute “Silver Thread Golden Needle,” the first offering from his upcoming project Britpop. Timing it to the New Year was no accident. The song represented a new start for Cook, an artist still defining himself even after being the figurehead of such an influential era in pop music.
Even if you don’t know Cook as the founder of PC Music, you likely know him as creative director for Charli XCX, whom he’s worked with since 2017, or as a collaborator of the late producer SOPHIE. After releasing a handful of singles on PC, Cook made his proper entrance as a solo artist in 2020 with not one but two debut albums, the sprawling 7G and more refined Apple. Now, Britpop is the neatest merging of all sides of Cook. He splits the project into “Past,” “Present,” and “Future” discs, eight tracks each, crafting a mosaic that goes far beyond the sound he’s become known for.
Cook insists that New Alias, the new label he launched alongside the album, won’t be a re-creation of PC Music. But he’s still kept PC’s cheeky attitude in his rollout — specifically through pop-up parody-news site Witchfork, music marketplace Wandcamp, and beat commissary Wheatport. (He insists they’re made with reverence.) He continues to collaborate widely as well, most recently in the duo Thy Slaughter with original PC artist Finn Keane, a.k.a. Easyfun, and on Charli XCX’s upcoming album, Brat. Cook speaks eagerly and openly about his next era — though he says explaining his still-developing plans for New Alias can feel like “trying to describe the moon.”
You called this album Britpop, and your recent album with Thy Slaughter was called Soft Rock. Those titles sound like a provocation.
It’s a provocation to Finn and I in Thy Slaughter, or to myself when I’m doing Britpop, or even on some of the albums I worked on with Charli. We tend to know the title fairly early, so it becomes something that we’re discussing: What’s the ultimate track for this? What’s the thing that would make it not that? If I don’t have that end goal, then it could be anything.
It seems like that impulse to define things is where Britpop’s “Past, Present, Future” concept comes from. How did that coalesce over time?
It’s the idea that made the album feel real. Apple and 7G in 2020 had their own concepts. I’d been A.G. Cook for about sevenish years at that point, and I very intentionally didn’t have an album. I was against albums, really. I didn’t want a canonical A.G. Cook sound, even though you could argue there is sort of one. Work as a producer seemed to define what I was doing in a really satisfying way. And I didn’t want to fall into the trap of having the classic producer album with my friends featuring on different tracks. I wanted to do something more jarring. As soon as I have some kind of funny sorting system, I’m not trying to just make the perfect 12-track thing.
So “Past, Present, Future” gave me a way of doing a slightly longer album without it being exactly the same. It actually enabled me to be a lot more loose with it and be like, Okay, these are songs that evoke something about the past for me — but the past where it’s like vocal chops and early DJ edits. Then with “Present,” these are songs with in-the-moment lyrics. And then “Future” is all the tracks that almost make me feel uncomfortable, where I’m like, Oh, the tempo is a bit wrong, or What’s this genre?
For someone who has been hailed as being futuristic, it feels quaint to organize something into discs in the streaming era.
I personally find streaming a really crazy thing to wrap my head around. If I have a friend who’s done a whole new phase or campaign, when the album finally gets on streaming, it feels like that’s not really the album. The real album is somewhere between the live shows, maybe the DJ edits — all the extra noise around it makes it feel real. That’s not to say the album isn’t a thing for some people. But it’s almost like to really make it feel like an album on streaming, you have to transcend it. For me, the disc is one way of nudging the listener, being like, It’s not just this. There’s some other thing at work here. To break it into discs one, two, and three, someone has to look it up or think an extra millisecond.
You enjoy drawing those hard lines. You did it when you dropped the album’s first track on January 1, 2024, a day after winding down PC Music. Why was that very definite end point interesting to you?
When I first was uploading music, I thought it was going to take a really long time for anyone to have any attachment to it. For it to have an identity within its first year or two was really shocking. But as I got closer to ten years, I was like, There’s so many interesting releases from the very beginning. We needed to do something to analyze it and work on maintaining and making people remember that stuff in as big a way as possible. It was a responsibility to the genesis, and to the old stuff, and to the whole scene and subculture.
It’s also very much riffing with the crazy speed that the music industry is changing. That’s actually a lot of PC stuff. You could talk about the sounds and the visuals and so on, but at its heart, it was always an attitude that, rather than it trying to be sci-fi or future, it’s actually just what’s going on right now.
As the anniversary was coming up, was there any discomfort in sticking with this thing that had been going for ten years?
It’s just me being pragmatic. It’s acknowledging that that is a very defined era for all those people’s work. It’s saying that the label is really meaningful, but the work goes beyond it. Therefore, you have to make the label a really clear boundary. I believe so much in the work of the people who have releases on it or have taken part in shows. If I was more uncertain, I would have been more hesitant, like, We need to still incubate this. But looking at all the stuff everyone’s doing, and some of the upcoming collaborations and albums and credits, I was like, Damn. It’s more than the sum of its parts. I can’t even perceive it, honestly.
Britpop is coming out on a new label called New Alias. What is it, and what is it going to do?
I’ve obviously done stuff as other aliases and I am interested in the notion of aliases. I thought it was also kind of funny where the first release on New Alias is just my own oldest alias, my actual name.
I’m very proud of the range that PC Music had. And I don’t necessarily want to re-create something at that scale. I am definitely doing releases that aren’t just Britpop and aren’t just strictly A.G. ones. The idea of the imprint is that, without the protocol of a traditional label, if there’s ever something that needs to have either its own branding or its own strange rollout, or if I make some music with someone else and I’d be like, “You know what? We should clone ten websites and put it out like that.” Anything that I could work on that would have a very unusual way of hitting streaming. Rather than just signing to another label, to have more of my own corner where I can do these collaborative releases that I then get to direct, somewhat.
How is that different than PC Music?
A lot of the fun of PC was to take an artist with as much confidence as if they were signed to a major, then gradually bring their personality into it. I think New Alias is looking at it from a position beyond that, where I’m looking to take familiar things, maybe ground that I’ve explored before or artists that I’ve already done things with, and recontextualize them and play with that ambiguity.
The playful electronic songs on the “Past” disc are closest to what we’ve heard from PC Music. What was it like to make those songs while explicitly denoting them as the part we’re leaving behind?
It’s just me being a bit facetious, too. The first track on the “Future” disc, “Soulbreaker,” is by far the oldest song. That predates Apple. A lot of the stuff on the “Past” disc, they reference the mind-set and the idealism of a certain era, but the sound they have is a little bit more advanced or reflective of the work I’ve done since. And I don’t just mean hitting harder, but the sounds that it travels through or the length of some of the tracks and the scope. I definitely don’t think these are the last eight tracks I’m going to make with vocal chops and I’m parking them right here. It’s more like trying to imagine a headspace, and constantly playing with that time loop.
How did the melody from Charli’s 2017 song “Lipgloss” come back into “Britpop”?
I wanted her to sing something that was saying “Britpop,” and I just heard it in the same tone as that outro for “Lipgloss,” which is a very Charli flow anyway. I recorded her doing it in the middle of us working another song. I think it took literally under a minute. It was so familiar to us.
Music is just so referential anyway. In my mind, songs go beyond the version that you might have on your computer. I think that’s an ingredient that is going to come to the fore more and more now: the idea of music as a performance with some variation, that it’s not completely stuck in place. I’m always drawn to music that does that. I think some people find that a bit annoying, as if they’ve been cheated. Like, “I thought I was getting a new hook here. I paid for a new hook.” That’s the saddest thing.
I saw it when “Britpop” came out. People were a little confused, feeling like this wasn’t fully a new song. But that’s the fun here.
It’s the irony, right? If you’re in Boiler Room and it’s suddenly a familiar vocal, everyone’s like, it’s their favorite bit.
You’ve said that the “Present” disc features these one-take, more raw songs. How was making those different?
I’m not normally a lyrics-first person. Other things like melody or sounds or textures and chords, all of that stuff comes to me much more immediately than lyrics. But every now and then, I’ll have a very defined idea. A song like “Nice to Meet You” or “Without,” they were written through, as in I had the chords, I then had pretty much the full lyrics, and then I immediately tried to record it. So the whole thing was all done in such a short time frame that it feels a bit like a photograph.
It’s interesting to hear that “Without” was one of the songs that you wrote right away. It’s a very touching tribute to SOPHIE, but it toes this line where it’s not schmaltzy.
It’s about SOPHIE in a sense, but also, it’s about processing that kind of thing. You can only do that by yourself. We obviously had a lot of mutual friends and family ties, people I would talk to. But that process is an isolated, truly reflective, kind of strange one. And the track is more about that.
The tributes to SOPHIE’s personality are in other parts of the album. Some of the attempts to do an uplifting dance track that’s a bit cheeky, or to do an outro that is amusing, or to do these flips that remind me of some of the music-making. If I’m thinking about the headspace of early PC tracks, I’m thinking about all the times I spent in the studio with SOPHIE, or doing random shows, or conversations. That’s still a voice that’s part of my mind-set when I’m doing those things.
That cheekiness also makes me think of hearing Addison Rae on this album.
That song, “Lucifer,” is a really old song. I was working on it before how i’m feeling now. It was a song I just had by myself, and then Charli was into it and then she was rerecording it, changing lyrics. But it didn’t make sense. It’s a good example of me putting things on that disc where I’m just like, What is this? I always had this version of the song where Charli sounded great and it just had these blank verses where I was mumbling.
I’d been writing with Addison. She’s so encyclopedic about music. She has a pretty strong perspective on everything. I had this outro to a song we had done, a demo, and that fragment of it I always thought was so good. Then I realized it fit perfectly into this. It feels like this strange counterpart to the “Von Dutch” remix with Charli, where it sounds like they’re on different planets.
I thought I had heard it before.
That’s what I mean. The verse sounds like it’s some other pop song that you might know or might not. Addison’s voice sounds so classic, and it’s so filtered down, and then you get into the chorus and it’s like, Oh, here’s a hook for something else.
I’m always interested in people who play with pop music and have their own specific voice and have a dialogue in the music. That’s what I love about the Charli and Addison remix — they’re basically talking. The conversational quality is something that really runs through a lot of Brat as well, Charli’s new album, and I think that’s something that Addison is very, very good at.
Seeing Addison’s name on the “Von Dutch” remix with you and Charli, that felt a bit like the early PC days — like, Are they serious?
I feel like I live in a world where Addison Rae is already a pop star. It’s the same world where there’s bands who I know haven’t released anything, and I feel like they’re already the biggest band in the world. That’s the constant potential of music, why fans of pop music even bother keeping up with this impossible-to-define genre, right? Because there’s always this feeling that something you heard just now could be the biggest thing in the world next week.
I’ve been seeing your name pop up more in what we might call the mainstream sphere: doing remixes for Lady Gaga and Jungkook, or being on Renaissance. Are these new calls that you’ve been getting, or are you saying yes to things that you wouldn’t have said yes to before?
There’s not a lot of things that I’ve gone out of my way to say no to. I’m very interested in the constant ambiguity between mainstream and underground, especially now where the weirdest things are popular and it’s constantly shifting. I always think anything could become mainstream. What’s really drawn me to L.A. is the culture of some total weirdos working on some of the biggest albums. These established people will be like, “Oh, have you heard my other project?” and it’ll be something crazy. For someone like me who is doomed and blessed to be on the fringes of mainstream and underground forever, I really see that as my ideal spot, where I can cross-pollinate and cross-contaminate all this stuff.
Now that you’re releasing albums under your own name, how do you plan to balance that and working with other artists?
Having done these shifts where I have a few years where I’m not really making my stuff, and then I come back, it seems like a genuine way to have a horse in the race. When I go deep with another artist, we can really talk about all these things.
My campaigns are quite risky. I’m not really trying to chart. I’m just trying to have a meaningful dialogue with an audience and see if there’s others who are interested. My photo shoots are all over the place stylistically. Even what I’m doing right now with Witchfork and Wandcamp. It’s like I was talking about with the early days of PC — being like, This is the state of things now. This is where the internet’s at. This is where campaigns are at. If I can make music that feels interesting to me and then put it out in a way that is in dialogue with all of that chaos, that’s really my long-term goal.
The title is a nod to Cook’s own British heritage, even though he currently works in the U.S.
Cook has also released music as DJ Lifeline, as well as Dux Content with Danny L. Harle, Lipgloss Twins with felicita, and Thy Slaughter with Easyfun.
Charli XCX’s 2020 album, written and recorded during the first two months of the pandemic.
