Sporting a striped band of dyed hair in the shape of a pair of headphones, April Harper Grey, known professionally as underscores, sits for a creator interview with Our Generation Music prior to the debut of her third studio album “U.” Nine minutes into the 24-minute long video, the host provides underscores with a printout of a post authored by @headphoneemoji on X: “is anyone else so scared for the new underscores album What if it changes music forever”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s going to do all that,” underscores answers. When asked what it will do, underscores responds, “Numbers.”
Presently, “U” has indeed received an 8.6/10 rating from Pitchfork—a fitting score for its place on the magazine’s Best New Albums page—as well as five stars from NME and four from The Guardian. Additionally, a TikTok fan edit boasting 2.5 million views has drawn crowds of excited new supporters and confused passersby alike. “why is the algo pushing underscores so hard, please stop,” complains @haloground in a reply with over 6,000 corroborating likes—a testament to her present ubiquity, at least. Those in the periphery of similar electropop/EDM acts, like Jane Remover or oklou, may recall underscores’ feature on the latter’s “choke enough” album or her gigs opening for 100 gecs and Porter Robinson. underscores’ own prior releases are hardly trivial, with her 2021 debut album “Fishmonger” remaining a substantive ripple of the pandemic hyperpop wave, but what makes “U” so special to so many people at this particular moment? Could even I understand “U”?
To resolve this problem requires tackling the composition of underscores’ artistic character. Though underscores’ projects span from hyperpop to indie rock to electronic-adjacent, each of her albums incorporates a new tag—a musical motif spliced most often at the beginning or end of her songs as a thematic stamp. In her debut album “Fishmonger,” underscores promised, “It’s a new wave of the future.” With 2023’s “Wallsocket,” she chanted, “Good luck!” This time, the characteristic tag implies a certain reciprocity: “I-O-U.”
Moments after pressing play on “U”’s opening track, underscores, cordial and delighted, calls out: “Hey! It’s you!” In track one of nine, “Tell Me (U Want It),” underscores clips off the final letter of the tag on its way to cue in the verse, leaving us to complete the familiar schema (I owe—!). “U” was originally streamed in full on YouTube via a shaky, handheld camera that followed underscores around a mall for 34 minutes. The point of view of the live listening party puts the viewer implicitly equal with underscores, as if having stumbled upon her in a natural habitat. The album, however, appreciates an ambivalence towards the concepts of fame and love. With music as a conceptual and literal throughline, underscores occupies the role of a nascent popstar negotiating her own obscurity or lack thereof.
Take “Do It”: the pre-release single seems to taunt the recipient of underscores’ affections as she wonders, “Don’t you get it? / People get my lyrics tattooed on their bodies.” However, in the same song, she insists, “I just can’t do it / It’s all on the line for me / You could ruin everything.” With a similar push-and-pull rhythm, the third track of the full album, “Hollywood Forever,” speaks to a recalcitrant audience underscores manages to coax into dancing through two beat drops and a dreamy outro. As if taking the listener along, underscores puts forth, “And you say, I’m so, I’m so Hollywood? / Well, aren’t we all so, all so Hollywood?”
Similarly, underscores purports that “U” was written while on the road between performances, particularly at liminal spaces like hotels, airports and, as the YouTube stream suggests, malls. By the time the chorus of the first track arrives, the viewer has traveled from a static position at the top of an escalator to ground level with underscores as she dances along to “Tell Me (U Want It)” with a suitcase in tow. The soundscape teleports from gentle throbbing guitar to a sticky, thumping beat. Within a minute, the listener has been inoculated to underscores’ fast-moving world.
Overall, “U” does not stray as far from genre conventions as previous releases like aforementioned “Wallsocket”—the nearly 55-minute long release flirting erratically with indietronica, folk, rock and electropop influences. At its best, “U” avoids musical flavor fatigue by taking the production up to 10 in the back half. What that unique “it factor” is varies per song; for instance, my personal favorite track, “Innuendo (I Get U),” devotes its final 60 seconds to a distilled adrenaline rush almost inverse in nature from the pared-down instrumental, miles away, of the introduction. Even the album’s shortest song, “The Peace,” puts all of its two-and-a-half minutes to use. Structured around three smoke breaks in the arc of a frail relationship, each lap is marked off by wordplay between “speak,” “spoke” and “smoke.” Like the relationship, underscores introduces further sonic complexity each time around the bend before delivering us to a final rousing chorus, holding the song together via the punctuation of repeated vocal chops.
In my personal opinion, the weaker songs fail to surprise; in others’ personal opinions, the weaker songs overstimulate. As underscores herself has noted, there is a diversity of opinion among even those who broadly enjoy the album such that there is not really a most popular track. Even at its worst, for its flaws, one cannot help but find oneself at the feet of a fully realized project. It is the sort of album one must evaluate on one’s own terms. April Harper Grey is here; to meet in the middle, all you need to have is “U.”