3OH!3 is an electropop duo from Boulder, Colorado, that briefly ruled the late 2000s with a sound best described as frat-house synth.
Sean Foreman and Nathaniel Motte met at the University of Colorado and started making music in 2004. Their name is a reference to the area code 303, which covers Boulder and Denver. The exclamation points were optional; the energy was not.
Their breakthrough came with “Don’t Trust Me” in 2008 — a song built around a crude joke (“Shush girl, shut your lips / Do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips”) and a hook so infectious it did not matter. The track went triple platinum. Suddenly, 3OH!3 was on every playlist, every party, every car stereo driven by someone too young to know better.
Their style was deliberately obnoxious: party anthems about drinking, flirting, and not caring, delivered with shouted vocals and buzzing synthesizers. They collaborated with Ke$ha on “My First Kiss” and Katy Perry on “Starstrukk.” Critics hated them. Teenagers loved them. The music was disposable by design — meant to be screamed at parties and forgotten by morning.
Their moment was brief. By the early 2010s, the electropop wave had moved on, and 3OH!3’s sound felt dated. They kept releasing albums, but the mainstream had moved to EDM and hip-hop. The party ended.
But for a few years, 3OH!3 was perfect at what they did. They did not pretend to be artists. They were a good time, compressed into three minutes, with a beat drop and a chorus you could not escape. Sometimes, that is enough.