In the heat of Summer 2025, April Harper Grey of underscores dropped a new song aptly named 'Music'. Covertly or not, it landed as something of a declaration of war on the hyperpop and EDM communities she neighboured. Masked beneath the maximalist, practically dubstep production was an energy and ferocity of songwriting that felt swaggering, confident; Grey's own way of saying she's at the top of her game.
It's a boisterous, irritatingly catchy crowd-raiser of a hit that sounds more than happy to throw a million things at the wall — not just in earnest of seeing what'll stick, but with the out-there aim of somehow incorporating the sound of said stick into the mix. It's loud, proud, off-kilter, delightfully experimental and unapologetically 'underscores'.
It was shocking, then, to open up the tracklist of her latest album U and hear that it sounds wholly antithetical at times to what the singles cultivated. The final product is less a round-trip through the capabilities of off-world modern hyperpop, and more so a portal back to the now-derelict malls and nostalgic shopping centres of 2012, or a charter on the dream-like liminance of exploring a commercial ghost town. It's a sound she fittingly names "galleria" as if it is born only to service, soundtrack and self-drive through these vainglorious, capitalist superstructures and their pearly, trampled-on gloss.
She makes that attitude clear enough in the album cover: a frenetic, scribbled imagining by Ochiai Shohei of a mall whited out from root to end, plastered all over with the attention-grabbing colours of storefronts and their stock. Central is the underscores logo, as if to say this record wasn't meant to overcrowd a club or fill a room, but to ricochet pillar-to-pillar through the consumer chambers of everyday spaces and architectural cages.
Without this imagery at the helm, U sounds a little disorganised, or perplexing to the ear. Such a confident kick-off in singles 'Music' and 'Tell Me (U Want It)' is lost, almost like the forward momentum was burned to propel the sound in a new direction. Gone with the ear-flooding confidence; in with a mall-fit intimacy. It never sounds totally alien to the underscores sound, but always most synonymous with her quietest moments, like Wallsocket's 'Horror movie soundtrack'. Whether by design or by mere coincidence, Grey has made an album that sounds flaked straight off the skin of 2010s radio pop, seasoned with the brazen, delightfully U experimentation of the new sound.
Vocal melodies float along predictably — the kind of thing you can manifest to hear in your head by simply reading the lyrics. This isn't meant pejoratively, as it gives space for underscores to sweep you into this entrancing, indoor production that almost sounds ambient when not pushed to its loudest setting. In that sense, it's the perfect galleria soundscape: omnipresent, but only when you want to pay attention to it.
The most exciting thing about this record is how it almost plays as two complete, distinct things. The first two listens are polar opposites, exemplifying how so much of U's potential is entrenched so impressively deep into the mix that it can appear invisible. She doesn't want you to completely not get it, though. Nearly every track crawls forward at a relaxing, delightfully bedroom-pop pace in its fledgling minutes before hitting some kind of rebirth. A seamless detonation into techno-pop bliss.
'Lovefield' elegantly dances forward for a while in the twilight, hitting like a moonlit transposition of underscores' work with Oklou on 'harvest sky'. Every verse builds up the kineticism slightly until the walls collapse under the pressure: the sound can no longer be contained in this kind of (s)mall space, and soars straight through the skylight into the endless air. Every beat of this is classy, masterful pop noise, flying through a mix of processed autotuning of voice memos and beautifully raw renditions on the underscores vox. Undoubtedly a highlight of music this year so far.
Similarly, the penultimate 'Bodyfeeling' is a timeless, certified radio touchdown in another life. The recurring, eponymous hook "I get a body feeling" sounds like a conjured spirit of the 2010s if it were made today, later slipping into an anthemic and effortless final chorus to blow the roof off. 'Wish U Well' heightens the experimentation a little while, never straying from the elegant harmonies Grey is all too good at delivering. The production swirls and bubbles with sentimentality and intimate fervour in some of the album's best lyrics.
That being said, there's still room on this nine-track blitz for some songs to be unruly from the rip. 'Do It' is a surprisingly heavy victory lap before the race is even over, with underscores barraging us with rhetorical appraisals "How does my song go? Am I in your playlist?" that sound just as unrelenting as underscores' own charismatic character would have you believe — it's the same person who bleached her headphone iconography into her hair, after all. The sound is still hypnotically commercial and urban, but this time more apropos for a monochromatic, metallic subway journey or collapse through the New York underlines where Grey currently resides.
After it all goes by in a flash, U sounds different and foreign to the hyperpop zeitgeist, but welcome, and affectionately conceptual, recontextualising the energy of modern, experimental pop into something adjacent though more laser-focused. Hints of all of her contemporaries are in here: the delicacy of an Oklou track that complements the moonlight, or the flavour of a Revengeseekerz without all the unbridled rage. It's difficult not to wish that it spent a bit longer off the leash, less subdued and able to really break into a stride, but those moments we do get are bound to occupy my queues and playlists until underscores comes back with something bigger, bolder, and still emphatically herself.
https://open.spotify.com/album/1qSS0T6Ffrb3rFVpizzOuk?si=wVG_JdGYQL689Q2EeTaEEQ
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