‘Oh’ appears on screen eight times in eight different fonts, each one superimposed over the other, at the same time as the word is sung over and over, in a light and fruity vocal, by singer-songwriter Charli XCX. A tone in the background, like in inverted cymbal crash, grows and takes us into the start of the song proper, as Charli sings about the thrill of getting calls from her crush. Like a karaoke video, the lyrics continue to appear on screen at the same time as they are sung. But unlike karaoke, they manifest in a stagger-ing array of fonts, and they pulse and stretch to correspond with the aural qualities and inflections of their vocal articulation. At times they become completely illegible, a mass of neon globules and baffling superimposition. After the first chorus – in which Charli describes how her boy's unique ring-tone is the only one she knows – pop trio Kero Kero Bonito arrive into the song and ruminate on how a ringtone ‘could be anything’, even a ‘barking dog’ or a ‘revved engine’. The key, as they sing, is that the noise must capture the user's attention. Each line of this verse is plastered across the screen: the word ‘ringtone’ dominates in a chunky 1970s font, purple outlined with orange, beating like a heart with the rhythm of the song; subsequent lines appear over this, with ‘dog’ and ‘engine’ accompanied by low-resolution images of these things.

This is the lyric video for the song ‘ringtone (remix)’ by the experimental hyperpop duo 100 gecs (2020a). Available on YouTube, this extremely lo-fi video relies on a tight intermingling of image and sound – and little else. As a lyric video rather than a more traditional or official music video, it prioritises the words of the song, and seems to have very little production value (a single talented individual might have put it together in an afternoon using After Effects). But this does not mean it is sparse, simplistic, or that the relationship of the visuals to the music is purely that of semantic illustration. Rather, the bubble-gum baroque designs on display articulate the aural qualities of the voice, key, rhythm, timbre, and pitch of each particular moment of the song in peculiar but tightly bonded ways.