It’s 2013, Skrillex’s ‘Bangarang’ is a little over a year old, and brostep – a heavier iteration of dubstep – has America in its grip. It’s also captivated Underscores, now a beloved producer on the vanguard of hyperpop but then just a 12-year-old making EDM on SoundCloud. “I was like, ‘This is alien music’,” April Harper Grey recalls. “I was obsessed. I made it my whole life.”
Calling from Chicago days before she embarks on the European leg of Porter Robinson’s world tour, the now-24-year-old timidly reminisces about formative SoundCloud subcultures that incubated her affinity for electronic music production – and gradual transition to hyperpop and digicore. Grey is now a solo artist, but she was once just a playful member of several artsy, experimental online collectives. “Collectives were huge. Everyone from 2014 to 2020 was making a fucking collective,” she laughs. “And I was in, like, three of them.”
Underscores on The Cover of NME. Credit: Alexa Viscius for NMEGrey speaks fondly of those early, “low stakes” days holed up behind the computer. “I’m super blessed to have had the urge to make music when I was younger before I was tweaking about stupid industry shit like branding. I was 12, and I didn’t give a shit. But now I’m fucking terrified all the time.”
The cult fandom around Grey has been building for some time now, but she’s not quite accustomed to the burgeoning fame. Her 2018 EP ‘Skin Purifying Treatment’ – the first time she felt brave enough to lend her voice to music – earned a profound emotional response from a small but devoted online audience. The pressure mounted following her 2021 debut proper ‘Fishmonger’, which led to a supporting slot on a 100 gecs tour.
“Ever since, I’ve [worried] I’m going to constantly let down the people who like that [music],” she explains. “Once the music’s out, it doesn’t feel like I made it or that I’m responsible for it. It’s like I’m doing karaoke. It’s a much older version of me that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Credit: Alexa Viscius for NMEHer second album, ‘Wallsocket’ – a grungy hyperpop tour de force and her label debut on respected indie Mom+Pop – established the San Francisco-born artist as a fly-on-the-wall storyteller of complexity with heaps to say about the American experience, and lit Underscores’ fast-spreading hype.
The record sees Grey, a self-confessed “woman of American circumstance”, observe the fictional town of Wallsocket, Michigan, where three suburban girls come of age and reckon with religion, violence, class dissonance and feminine rage. She pertinently critiques the tensions of Middle America, which proved popular among her politically informed audience. “Exploring those little pockets of frustration is important,” she asserts. “I was thinking a lot about the cards that are dealt in America. The US has a unique lottery. Everyone’s a victim of American circumstance.”
Though campy and buoyant as all hyperpop is, coming of age in Wallsocket is less Juno, more Scream. ‘Shoot To Kill, Kill Your Darlings’ is a teenage dirtbag cut that muses on gun violence: “You’re just a little kid / You shouldn’t have to choose how to die.” In opener ‘Cops And Robbers’, a bank teller embezzles customer cash to fund a meth addiction; ‘Johnny Johnny Johnny’ explores the grooming of a transgender teen, while ‘Geez Louise’ highlights the erasure of third genders in Filipino culture following Spanish colonisation and the rise of Catholicism. It’s tongue-in-cheek but deadly serious.
“I want my new music to be a more comforting place for people to visit, and for me too”
This is Underscores so far: a one-woman musician behind a computer, straddling the line between fiction and reality, wielding the satirical boisterousness of hyperpop to critique the surreal, contemporary American landscape. She’s made it so big she’s now got fans requesting autographs on their passports and is fielding awkward interactions in In-N-Out. “I’m like, damn,” she laughs. “When I’m not at a show, and I get stopped randomly, it’s crazy. They’re like, ‘Hey, are you Underscores?’ and then I still have to wait there for my food.”
Despite Grey’s incisive observations of the US across ‘Wallsocket’, she still speaks with some trepidation. She’s careful to criticise experiences she hasn’t had – that haven’t been her American circumstance. For Grey, a trans woman with a white father and Filipino mother, home was not conservative Middle America but instead the diverse, artsy city of San Francisco. There, she found community in a “way chiller” Episcopalian church than its stricter Catholic counterpart, and faith instilled hope, not oppression. Though she’s no longer practising, Grey still enjoys the feeling of “someone out there, watching your back”, much like Underscores does for the girls of ‘Wallsocket’.
As an urbanite, the artist daydreamed about fictional rural towns like Wallsocket. Her protagonists exist in a romanticised Middle America that’s blanketed by nostalgia and calls to mind gentle memories of her grandparents’ Idaho home. “I would see this town in my head and be like, ‘This is my heaven’. But I couldn’t make [‘Wallsocket’] and ignore the issues of why it exists,” she says. The album, with all the hyper-American jest of a Blink-182 or All-American Rejects project (if they were produced by Umru), captures a generation who yearn for an American dream that, it seems, cannot exist without an underbelly of violence, intolerance and industrious ugliness.
Credit: Alexa Viscius for NMEGray’s ascent to hyperpop stardom wasn’t as gloomy as her work suggests; rather, her path was coloured with joy. From the age of six, she produced songs on her father’s well-equipped computer – himself a solo rock musician – which imbued in the young Underscores the value of solitary and mathematical composition. She’d burn CDs for family and teachers and compete in SoundCloud remix challenges. Her Filipino family would sit around at her aunt and uncle’s place, playing ukulele from songbooks. This, alongside hymn-singing at church, was Grey’s first exposure to the idea that music could be communal and powerful. Meanwhile, a love of Madonna’s electronica record ‘Music’, Imogen Heap’s intricate pop and the bluesy Americana of Jack White help explain her knack for painting an American pastiche by way of poetic EDM.
As such, she’s multifaceted in the way she works but primarily still prefers time alone with the computer – in some ways the Gen Z internet emo archetype. “It’s hard for me to make Underscores music with other people, but I really enjoy working with other people,” she explains. “The egotistical part of me needs to make everything myself – while doing side quests with people.”
On ‘Wallsocket’, isolation won, and the American dystopia took its grip. “I was a mad scientist,” she admits. “I was going crazy.” But if she made the album again today, she’d make something “comforting” and more in touch with those early ideas of sonic joy. “I wanted horror. I wanted devastation. But that’s not an emotion anyone needs right now,” she reasons.
“Once the music’s out, it doesn’t feel like I made it or that I’m responsible for it. It’s like I’m doing karaoke”
“[Now, it would] exist in a vacuum: a world you can visit and want to stay in, instead of one where we’re examining all that’s wrong with it. We’re doing that every day. And I hate the music [now]. It’s weird to get on stage and regress.”
So, the Underscores modus operandi – pop-rock brimming with Twin Peaks-level lore and mystery – will evolve to accommodate this yearning for lighthearted escapism. Underscores has “not touched a guitar, pretty much at all” for her next album; it comprises “mainly MIDI keyboard computer music”. “Everything was way too intentional. [Now], everything is: ‘fuck it’. It’s way more ‘brain off’ right now than it’s ever been.”
As Grey searches for calm, one thing that won’t change is the tongue-in-cheek nature of Underscores’ music. “I grew up watching parodies online. That seeps into the music. But anyone that makes hyperpop will say the same thing: it’s all sincere. It’s all earnest.”
Credit: Alexa Viscius for NMEThe recent mainstreaming of hyperpop, once the underground province of labels like PC Music and other online experimentalists, now offers huge opportunities for artists like Underscores. Although definitions of the genre remain loose – Grey says it’s more a feeling than a sonic template – far more people are aware of it now. “I mean, ‘Brat’ happened. Labels want hyperpop artists [now]. They want people that are making left-of-centre pop music, which is sick.”
Being signed and making music in the public eye has Grey feeling the pressure, but she still buzzes with nervous excitement. Next month, she’ll hit the Coachella stage, with a fresh Umru collaboration to be released around the same time. “Coachella’s gonna be fire,” she enthuses, but the nerves are kicking in fast. “I played Lollapalooza in 2022; I remember the morning of that having a pit in my stomach. The pit is starting early [for Coachella].”
After conquering the desert, Grey will shift her focus to creating less claustrophobic experiences than ‘Wallsocket’ allowed. Key to this change was not only political fatigue but recognition and responsibility. “Seeing how my music can affect larger groups of people – and hearing people, after shows, tell me what my music meant to them – has been so important [to ensure] I’m not pursuing music selfishly.” This approach conjures those early memories of communal musical experiences from her childhood: moments of togetherness where “someone has your back” amid the tumult of the contemporary American landscape.
“I don’t consider myself an emotional person day-to-day, but music helps me to amplify my emotions,” she muses, relaxed, twirling the string on her hoodie and staring beyond the screen. “I want my new music to be a more comforting place for people to visit, and for me too.”
Underscores plays Coachella April 12 and 19.
Listen to Undescores’ exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Otis Robinson
Photography: Alexa Viscius
HMU and Nails: Ana Bellini
Styling: Anika Ladero
Wardrobe Assistance: Niky Sampedro
Label: Mom + Pop
English (US) · 