After the crash: Four years after becoming an online sensation as ElyOtto, Elliott Platt has found a new path

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The new face of hyperpop never actually saw his face on the flashing billboard towering over Dundas Square.

At least not in person. In April 2021, Calgary-born Elliott Platt was a 17-year-old online sensation known as ElyOtto. Spin Magazine called him “one of the most popular musicians on the planet.” As such, Amazon Music went all out to promote his new single with a massive digital billboard in Dundas Square, the colourful and somewhat Blade Runner-esque public space in the heart of Toronto.

It featured ElyOtto with a COVID-19 mask hanging around his neck and his fingers pulling apart his lips to form a weird, lop-sided grin or grimace. He is flanked by the much more serious-looking faces of Kim Petras and Curtis Waters. Both were international stars in their own right at the time and had been enlisted by RCA to remix SugarCrash!, the sweary 80-second song that started it all for ElyOtto.

Platt’s father, Mike, had asked the brother of a friend who lived near Dundas Square to go snap a picture for posterity. Platt dutifully put the photo on Instagram and thanked Amazon Music. But he didn’t really think about it much until a few years later, when he was in Dundas Square. By that point, his face had been replaced multiple times by two years’ worth of gigantic, flashing ads promoting other movies, music and products.

“Seeing a billboard in person two years later kind of solidified it for me,” says Platt, in an interview with Postmedia from Montreal. “I was smoking a joint in front of said billboard and was like, ‘Whoa, my face must have been pretty big.’ I have to wonder, at the very least, what that giant rendition of my face had witnessed down on those filthy, filthy streets.”

“Every Torontonian I have told ‘I was on a billboard there once’ has not given a flying (expletive),” he adds with a laugh.

This anecdote may seem a rather on-the-nose metaphor for the fickle nature of pop stardom. But Platt has a deeper and more compelling story than that. In those two years, ElyOtto seemed to undergo an artistic growth spurt that made the notion of simply putting out more songs that sounded like SugarCrash! unpalatable to him.

Platt’s global, overnight success with that song is the sort of stranger-than-fiction tale that should have every wannabe pop singer screaming into their pillows with jealousy. In 2021, he was a 17-year-old trans kid living in Calgary who decided to battle boredom during the first round of COVID-19 lockdowns by dusting off some old beats he had cobbled together on GarageBand. He turned it into SugarCrash!, an autobiographical and impossibly catchy song about teenage ennui laden with auto-tuned vocals and f-bombs. Platt posted it on TikTok, and it took over the Internet, becoming an instant smash. He watched in astonishment as hits went from the thousands to the tens of thousands to the millions to the tens of millions. On Spotify, the original version of SugarCrash! has now surpassed 400 million plays. Not surprisingly, the industry quickly took notice. Platt’s parents eventually hired a lawyer to sort through the offers, which included interest from at least five major labels. A bidding war ensued. He eventually signed with RCA Records and, at one time, shared management with future superstar Tate McRae, a fellow Calgarian whose early career arc was strikingly similar to Platt’s. Spin Magazine wrote the first major story on ElyOtto and proclaimed him “The New Face of Hyperpop.” It was a heady title. Hyperpop is a subgenre embraced by transgender or gender-fluid artists. At the time, it was on the rise and was both marketable and cool for its counterculture leanings. All in all, it was the sort of career launch that most artists could only dream of.

So why did ElyOtto walk away from it all?

The reasons are complicated, a mix of external and internal pressures. Platt maintains that he was never particularly keen on being shaped by the music industry and immediately found the expectations stifling. While he says he doesn’t remember the exact details of the record deal, he thinks it was for multiple EPs and perhaps a full-length record. In 2022, RCA Records released ElyOtto’s eight-song EP Hellscape Suburbia, which he recorded at his home in Calgary. It was a solid release, with Platt showcasing deepening song craft while still cranking out catchy hyperpop anthems.

It was his first and last release for RCA. Comparing ElyOtto’s career arc to McRae’s – who Platt jokingly calls “my frickin’ rival” – is an interesting case study. McRae also started making music in her bedroom as a teenager before becoming an online sensation. She has parlayed that into a massively successful career in pop music over the last five years. She now resides in Los Angeles, records with A-list producers, has become tabloid fodder and fills stadiums around the globe. Her music is unapologetically marketable and mainstream. Platt, on the other hand, was probably never going to be a typical pop star and began to retreat from the spotlight almost immediately. Details about his departure from RCA are fuzzy – messages to RCA Records from Postmedia weren’t immediately returned – but Platt says it was amicable and surprisingly did not have any financial ramifications. On TikTok, ElyOtto is now the subject of a “where are they now?” segment, where it’s suggested he was dropped by the label because he couldn’t repeat the success of SugarCrash! Platt acknowledges that label brass were certainly looking for “SugarCrash 2, 3, and 4,” but the split wasn’t one-sided. He admits he was engaged in a bit of career self-sabotage at the time.

“The truth is I didn’t want to replicate the success of SugarCrash!,” he says. “I was a kid. It was too much for me to have all that attention all at once, and honestly, the last thing I wanted was to join the music industry and become a signed artist. I honestly did it so I could have the money to go to school, help out my family and have a car. I have all of these wonderful things now because I signed that label, and I got away pretty much scot-free. I struggled until they dropped me. It was my fault, I did it on purpose. They asked for a radio hit, I gave them noise.”

“I never gave them anything they wanted. I stopped responding to texts. I continued to make my own kind of music and fumbled around in my own musical journey without paying them any mind.”

There were other factors. Platt admits that having fleeting pop stardom overlap with his final high school years – he graduated in 2022 – may have led to an excess of alcohol and cannabis consumption, plus a certain “I can do whatever I want, I’m Elyotto a-la SugarCrash!” type attitude.

Still, there were other forces at play beyond his control. Intense online attention, including from anonymous trolls, is a reality for any artist these days. But it is often amplified when the artist is part of the trans community. While Platt acknowledges that he received messages from run-of-the-mill transphobes, he also received scrutiny from all corners of the online world. For the first few years, ElyOtto kept a significant presence on social media, including on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram.

“People aren’t exactly hostile so much as uneducated,” he says. “Some are like ‘No! Why did you turn gay?’ because I present a little more femininely now because I’ve grown up. Gender means something different to me now. I have it, I guess you can say, under control. I’m the master of my own gender at this point. I really wasn’t when SugarCrash! happened. I was trying a lot more to be one thing and ignore the parts of me that were feminine. People viewed me as a young man at that point, and I liked it. Now that I’ve shown my non-binary side, which was always there, mind you, I’m now more comfortable showing it on camera, and people are like, ‘No, he’s trans now! ElyOtto has become a girl!’ It’s really not like that. People try to make sense of my image, and it can come out as hostility and confusion. Yeah, it kind of sucked.”

Growing up with the Internet meant Platt had always been exposed to “the worst of the worst of what is said under the guise of anonymity” and had developed a hard shell. Still, it had an impact.

Some of the most virulent responses came from an unlikely community. In his pre-ElyOtto days, Platt had posted something on TikTok criticizing a song by K-pop superstars BTS. Fans somehow unearthed it, and Platt was inundated with messages from the band’s fans.

“My digital footprint came back to bite me on the ass,” he says. “People were jumping on me, trying to cancel me, calling me racist against Asians. They bullied me right off the Internet. I was so lucky for that. It was the first chip in the shell that got me back into real life, back into treating myself as a real person rather than a commodity.”

He says he accepted that the majority of hostility came from “kids online” and he never felt threatened when he was out in the real world.

“I couldn’t give you any examples of death threats I’ve received, even though there is that air of hostility and I have received messages like that,” he says. “I just block immediately and I keep no record. I try to forget. They mostly go for my music, just say, ‘This is trash. Are you a girl? Why is he wearing a bra? Are you trans?’ Someone called me a tranny the other day. That’s a pretty new one. But it’s almost funny. I don’t know why they were thinking that one would sting.'”

Blocking trolls and erasing their bile is certainly one effective response, says trans author, songwriter and publisher Vivek Shraya, a former University of Calgary assistant professor of creative writing who now lives in Toronto. Shraya recently chronicled her own musical aspirations on the autobiographical CBC Gem web series How to Fail as a Pop Star. She began her musical career while still identifying as a male and in a time when artists weren’t as exposed to, or obsessed by, online feedback. But she has faced hate online since coming out as trans in 2016. In 2019, she released the graphic novel Death Threat with illustrator Ness Lee. It was based on the harassment and threats she received.

“Different people engage with negative feedback or trolls in different ways,” she says. “Some people I know respond to trolls. I’m always in awe of that. When I get onto socials, if I see anything like that, I always block right away. I don’t want to digest it because I find it does start to take a toll, and I find myself second-guessing myself and hating myself, to be completely transparent. It’s second-guessing the work but can trickle into a form of self-loathing.”

Platt says online trolls did not factor into his decision to stop pursuing music as a full-time gig. But he avoids social media these days. He still has Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok accounts but rarely,  if ever, accesses or updates them. Earlier this summer, he packed up his pet spider – a Brazilian black tarantula named Shelob – and the rest of his things into his 2001 Oldsmobile Alero and drove from Calgary to Montreal. After considering attending an expensive music program in Berlin, he has instead opted to study anthropology. He asks that we not identify the school he is attending, initially saying he doesn’t want “someone showing up trying to hate-crime me,” but later says it’s more a matter of privacy. He first came to Montreal when his sister was there and immediately fell in love with the city and its music scene. While he doesn’t want to talk about the amount of money he made as ElyOtto, it’s safe to assume that hundreds of millions of hits on streaming services and online platforms and a major-label bidding war provided him with a significant enough nest egg to comfortably pay for school. He says he wants to form a band in Montreal and will continue to record under the ElyOtto name. He has released three singles in 2025 that showcase a variety of styles, from hyperpop to alt-pop to noisy dance-punk.

“I’m never going to stop making music, no matter what,” Platt says. “It’s my lifeblood.”

That said, he rarely tells people that he once had a massive TikTok song in 2021. It’s just not relevant, he says.

“In a way, I had a lot of these answers planned that would disprove everybody and show that I’m doing well,” says Platt, when asked why he agreed to an interview with Postmedia.”The truth is, it fluctuates. Nobody is going to be doing well all the time. I still struggle with my family, with my mental health, my personal issues. I’m learning every day. SugarCrash! has kind of faded into the background and allowed me certain financial freedoms that I otherwise wouldn’t have. My plan before this happened was to become a train-hopper. Obviously, that didn’t happen.”

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