It’s the end of 2020; lockdown is beginning to lift, the world tentatively opening back up. The word of the year, depending on the source, was either “pandemic”, “lockdown” or “quarantine”. But in music circles, it may just have been “”. The term referred to an internet-dwelling wave of artists, many of them not yet in their 20s, making music that was a love letter to the intensity and melodrama of but filtered through Gen Z’s genre-agnosticism and affectionate sense of irony.
Ericdoa on The Cover of NME. Credit: Paige Margulies for NME
By this point, the major label rush was well and truly on for this formerly underground community. Eric Lopez, a gawky 18-year-old at the time who went by the name Ericdoa (that’s pronounced ‘D-O-A’, a reference to the Dead or Alive video game series) was now at the centre of it. He had dropped the album ‘COA’ that November, an exhilarating rush of Autotune and garish synths that had made him the talk of hyperpop-specific communities on RateYourMusic and Reddit. He signed to Interscope [Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo] four months later, and dived into months of touring.
But to Lopez, now 21, and his friends, what they did wasn’t called hyperpop. It wasn’t called anything. These were kids who had met on the chat platform Discord while they gamed together; they hyped each other up and spurred each other on while they made music in their respective bedrooms. Now all of a sudden, their friendship group – which includes frequent collaborators like labelmate Glaive (he signed three years ago when he was 15), Quinn, Wido, and Kurtains – was thrust in front of the whole world. And Lopez, technically an elder of the scene, was still just a kid learning to be an adult.
“I really didn’t have the college experience so I didn’t get to fuck up for four years. But I decided to publicly fuck up for the past four years,” he says with a laugh on a Zoom call. It’s 10am and he woke up five minutes ago; he’s at home in LA, wrapped comfy in a blanket. “When you sign to a label young and you give an 18-year-old some money… I think there were a lot of things that I learned.” He was “selfish” back then, he says; he had always kept to himself, built an armour out of not giving a fuck what anyone thought.
Credit: Paige Margulies for NME
What broke Lopez out of that was getting out on tour for the first time in 2021, and seeing the physical proof of how much his music had connected with others. Some fans had his lyrics tattooed; others brought their parents and families along to share the experience with them. The mother of one fan approached Lopez after a show, and told him that night was the first time she’d seen her teenage son smile since his father died. “A major thing throughout my entire life was being so negative, thinking that nobody understood me and nobody had a similar experience to me,” he says. “And when you stare back at 800 kids who are screaming the same words that you wrote down in your fucking notes app, you definitely don’t feel like that anymore.”
Lopez is about to release his fourth project, ‘DOA’. After signing his record deal, he dropped a string of singles – including ‘Sad4whattt’ which got a major placement on the Euphoria soundtrack – followed by the collaborative EP ‘Then I’ll Be Happy’ with Glaive. In 2022, he put out his first full-length for the label, ‘Things With Wings’, which showcased a more straightforward pop side to Lopez’s sound. But looking back now, he isn’t particularly happy with it, he says today. “It wasn’t something that was a creative process. It was more like, ‘Ugh, now I gotta open my fucking DAW and make a song’. It felt like a job.” For a while, he hit a wall and stopped making music altogether; he questioned whether he ought to quit for good.
“I’m flexing that I’m a student of the game for pop music”
He found his mojo again from some unlikely sources. Lopez got into Monty Python for the first time, and he began to read about the Puerto Rican socialist group the Young Lords. Something about this combination energised him; left him determined to make his own mark on the world. He grasped onto that spark without the expectation of making a record out of it. “That’s what ‘DOA’ is. It’s just a bunch of songs that feel good to me, [that came from] just pieces of random inspiration throughout the year.” Deliberately, it shares a title with his very first EP, released in 2019. “Because it really feels like my young years of making music, where I’m just sitting there making a song to make a song,” he says.
You can, indeed, hear that this project is more full of life than Lopez’s output in past years. There’s a wide-eyed excitement in how he flits around from guitar-driven rock-outs (‘The Cake Is A Lie’) to slinky slow jams (‘Bigassbearman’) to bassy, driving bops (‘imcoolimgoodimstraight’). Mostly, you can tell he’s showing off his pop chops – recent single ‘Dancinwithsomebawdy’ is a dance-funk treat which serves as his catchiest and most impressive track yet.
“I’m flexing that I’m a student of the game for pop music, that I know how to write a pretty good hook or get an earworm stuck in your brain,” he says. He’s spent hours listening to the artists he calls the “GOATs”, like Lady Gaga and Charli XCX, figuring out how they crafted their melodies and choruses – taking notes of the rhythms, the amount of words. “I would break them down to a literal science. Just the ways that you could entice a listener, like you’re snake-charming them.”
Credit: Paige Margulies for NME
Lopez has had an analytical obsession with music since his childhood, when he started studiously making his way through a stack of his dad’s CDs, trying to break down and understand everything that was happening in them. He grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Fairfield County, Connecticut, who would break out instruments and sing at every family gathering. At school, he was a troublemaker, often getting suspended, while in his spare time he was constantly writing poetry and short stories.
When he started to set some of them to music and upload them to Soundcloud, he realised he’d found a meaningful outlet. “It straight-up kept me out of trouble – I was hanging around not-so-good influences at the time,” he says. The earliest stuff he uploaded was a fairly formulaic imitation of the Soundcloud rap that was in vogue at the time, he admits; but pretty quickly, he found a community of fellow artists and started to define his own sound, which merged moody trap with those exuberant pop influences. After years of evolution, ‘DOA’ sees him figuring out how to do that seamlessly, with his own voice – vulnerable and painfully honest, yet self-effacing and slightly smirking – at the forefront.
“I know how to get an earworm stuck in your brain”
From its beginning, the hyperpop scene was always a home for misfits: people who felt more at home in a like-minded online community than with any of the people around them. Many of the artists and their fans were in some way queer or trans, and the music itself was creatively free; dismissive of rules, trends or any outside opinions. “We assumed no one was listening or would care enough to even form an opinion about [our music],” Lopez says. “It became a lot larger just because more people joined and saw how much more accepting and happy it was than a lot of other sides of the internet.”
How did Lopez feel, then, to be at the vanguard of this community’s burst into the mainstream, with all the misunderstanding, commodification and internet discourse that comes with it? “I hated it at first, because everybody’s a fucking critic. That was just the worst time for hearing hyperpop philosophers on Twitter talk about a bunch of shit that they weren’t there for. But honestly, I get it – I get how it hurts and how it’s a scary situation when something that you have so much love for turns into something that’s commodified.”
Credit: Paige Margulies for NME
These days, he says, he just tries to remember that this music blew up for a reason – you get back what you put in, and fans are only recognising the genuine love that its creators have poured into it. “If I had a community [like the hyperpop fans] early on, I think I’d be a lot less anxious than I was before,” Lopez says.
Going forward, he says, you won’t find him living online as much as he once did; while Ericdoa may have been born on the internet, Eric Lopez is ready to enjoy his real life. “Seeing the way people think on the internet was definitely terrible and detrimental to my mental development as a young lad. At 21, I can happily say that I’m not on the internet as much as I was when I was 18.” Apart from that, he’s not totally sure what the future holds. What he does say is this: he’s become someone that his teenage self would be proud of. Speaking to Lopez, you get a sense that he’s truly come of age – he’s humble, mature, and ready to really stand by the art he’s making.
“I never was able to conceptualise the future, and I’m still not able to ‘cause it’s really scary,” he admits. “But I’m trying to think about the future more. Just doing what I love every day is what I hope I’m doing in the next 10 years – just making music for the family, man.”
Ericdoa’s new project ‘DOA’ is out now via Interscope Records
Listen to Ericdoa’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and here on Apple Music
Writer: Mia Hughes
Photography: Paige Magulies
Styling: Oliver Leon
MUA: Abraham Esparza
Label: Interscope
