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The online lore surrounding Underscores – the hyperpop musician April Harper Grey – is immense to the point of overwhelming.
On SoundCloud, there’s the trove of glitchy tracks she began posting as a 13-year-old enthralled with Skrillex. On Reddit, obsessives trawl through her digital footprint, including a YouTube channel where she used to dissect the mechanics behind her favourite K-pop hits. On YouTube, music professors highlight the wormhole tendencies of her 2023 album Wallsocket, a “Zoomer masterpiece” that came with its own alternate reality game and fake college newspaper.
“There’s not that much out there, I don’t think?” the 25-year-old laughs from a hotel room in San Francisco, the city where she was born and raised, ahead of a livestreamed album launch at her hometown mall. “I mean, I have some side accounts and all that, but nothing that people haven’t already found.”
You almost wonder what Underscores’ very online childhood would’ve been like if she’d had to contend with Australia’s under-16s social media ban. “Much better,” she laughs. “I’m happy for the childhood I got, but I definitely would have benefited from a little crackdown with the internet usage, because I was really on that all the time. And when you’re a kid, you’re just super vulnerable.”
The wormholes endure – “there’s this guy on YouTube that crossed London without going on roads, and I’ve been watching that to go to sleep each night,” she says – but, in between, Grey has crafted the first pop masterpiece of the post-Brat age. Her new album, U, sounds like the present dragging the past into the future.
It’s nostalgic but new, satirical but reverent, evoking the fertile sounds of Y2K-era pop but with a mad scientist’s brain and a sound designer’s touch. The beats on Do It, easily the pop single of the year, skitter like Timbaland’s iconic work for Justin Timberlake but with the distortion-heavy crunch of hyperpop. In the song’s music video, Grey lands K-pop choreography against the backlit silhouettes of early-2000s iPod commercials.
Single Music grinds like Blackout-era Britney via the wonky breakdowns of Grey’s lodestar, Skrillex. The US dubstep icon, whose real name is Sonny Moore, was such a formative figure in Grey’s musical awakening that she once used the username SonnyMooreFan77 during a Reddit Ask Me Anything session.
“He’s my favourite artist of all time and he’s constantly inspiring. He’s always pushing the envelope, and it all sounds new and futuristic,” she says. “That’s the biggest thing to me. I always want my music to sound like it could only happen in the year it came out.”
If U eschews the gonzo world-building of Wallsocket – a concept album that explored Grey’s trans identity via indie sleaze, pop-punk and ’60s girl groups (“It was really exhausting to do a lot of that stuff, and I was just super uninspired by the end,” Grey says) – there’s another method to its madness. In a sort of generation overload update of Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Grey imagined the music playing in a slick modern cityscape – “these third spaces where people gather, like malls and airports and supermarkets” – before making the songs to fit it.
During an extended stay in Minneapolis, she wrote songs in the Mall of America, the largest shopping centre in the Western Hemisphere, and an emblem of capitalistic excess: clean, sleek, busy. “I would go there every day, bounce the beat and just jot down lyrics,” she says. “I really hate a dead mall. They totally scare me. But I love when a mall is bustling and alive. I love seeing a bunch of people at the mall and being like, ‘OK, people are going outside and stuff.’”
Ironically, Grey doesn’t necessarily want her music to live in those spaces. Despite tours with 100 Gecs and Porter Robinson, and collaborations with Danny Brown and Oklou (“Harvest Sky is the biggest song I’ve ever been a part of”) that have moved her work to a bigger orbit, Grey’s not trying to be pop’s next main girl.
“I don’t think so, I think there’s a limit for me,” she says of her pop ambitions. “I think my version of pop stardom is probably different from, like, 2000s pop stardom. And I think that goes for anyone that is pursuing pop music in this decade.”
Like much of her generation, Grey is a self-aware student of pop. They’ve seen what stardom did to Britney, to Justin (Bieber or Timberlake, take your pick), and – God forbid – to Chappell. Even Charli XCX – pop’s great outsider, who took over the charts on her own experimental terms – has retreated from music after her overwhelming Brat summer. For Grey, who is based in Chicago, where DIY spaces dominate, success means making music for dedicated thousands rather than faceless millions.
“It’s a very inspiring thing to be like, ‘anything is possible’,” says Grey of the pop landscape after Charli XCX’s unprecedented mainstream takeover. “But I think at that level there’s a lot of sacrifice that goes into that, and I love my life right now. I like going outside and being able to not be noticed when I walk on the street.
“I feel there’s so many horror stories of pop stars that have gotten to that A-list and are under this microscope the whole time. Obviously, I want to push my work as far as it can go, but I definitely don’t want that.”
Born and raised in San Francisco to an American father and Filipina mother, Grey began releasing songs as Underscores on SoundCloud during middle school. Although she wasn’t raised religious, Grey and her brother attended an Episcopal school and went to church three times a week.
“The Episcopals are the chillest denomination, so it was pretty open,” says Grey. “But it was an all-boys school, K-8, so we were there for, like, nine years, just dealing with a bunch of middle-school boys in a very small grade. I think that f---ed me up a little more than the religion of it all.”
Obsessed with Skrillex, she learnt to make music via YouTube tutorials and GarageBand. Her dad, a former musician who later turned to tech, would help crack torrented programs for her.
“There were always instruments around the house,” Grey recalls. “He played, I don’t know, psych-rock or something. And he did really well, he was signed. He had one album on Elton John’s record label and then it went under or something, and I was about to be born, so he stopped doing it. But he came back with a bunch of his dad friends when I was seven years old for one more album. It was a prog-rock thing, very Rush-y.”
After high school, Grey attended the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for two years. Dad must be proud of her musical success. “Yeah, he checks the stats a lot,” Grey laughs.
On Do It, Grey playfully dissects her obsessive relationship to music, warning a potential partner that she’s “tryna run a business here” and can’t risk love getting in the way. On Music, she’s comparing a crush to harmonies and BPMs, revealing exactly what’s on her mind even when matters of the heart are involved. Has she had to start thinking about her priorities a lot more now?
“Definitely. I think after this album comes out, I’m really going to try and find some breaks away from music because it’s become very all-consuming for me, that’s why there’s love songs on this album where I’m equating a relationship with someone to my love for music. To me, it feels very equal in my head, which is a complicated thing. But I’d like to keep a nice balance for myself. I don’t want to let the music eclipse everything else in my life.”
U by Underscores is out now.
