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The online lore surrounding Underscores \u2013 the hyperpop musician April Harper Grey \u2013 is immense to the point of overwhelming.<\/p>\n
On SoundCloud, there\u2019s 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 \u201cZoomer masterpiece<\/a>\u201d that came with its own alternate reality game and fake college newspaper.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s not that much out there, I don\u2019t think?\u201d 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<\/a> at her hometown mall. \u201cI mean, I have some side accounts and all that, but nothing that people haven\u2019t already found.\u201d<\/p>\n You almost wonder what Underscores\u2019 very online childhood would\u2019ve been like if she\u2019d had to contend with Australia\u2019s under-16s social media ban. \u201cMuch better,\u201d she laughs. \u201cI\u2019m 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\u2019re a kid, you\u2019re just super vulnerable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The wormholes endure \u2013 \u201cthere\u2019s this guy on YouTube that crossed London without going on roads, and I\u2019ve been watching that to go to sleep each night,\u201d she says \u2013 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s nostalgic but new, satirical but reverent, evoking the fertile sounds of Y2K-era pop but with a mad scientist\u2019s brain and a sound designer\u2019s touch. The beats on Do It, easily the pop single of the year, skitter like Timbaland\u2019s iconic work for Justin Timberlake but with the distortion-heavy crunch of hyperpop. In the song\u2019s music video, Grey lands K-pop choreography against the backlit silhouettes of early-2000s iPod commercials.<\/p>\n Single Music grinds like Blackout-era Britney via the wonky breakdowns of Grey\u2019s lodestar, Skrillex. The US dubstep icon, whose real name is Sonny Moore, was such a formative figure in Grey\u2019s musical awakening that she once used the username SonnyMooreFan77 during a Reddit Ask Me Anything session.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s my favourite artist of all time and he\u2019s constantly inspiring. He\u2019s always pushing the envelope, and it all sounds new and futuristic,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s the biggest thing to me. I always want my music to sound like it could only happen in the year it came out.\u201d<\/p>\n If U eschews the gonzo world-building of Wallsocket \u2013 a concept album that explored Grey\u2019s trans identity via indie sleaze, pop-punk and \u201960s girl groups (\u201cIt was really exhausting to do a lot of that stuff, and I was just super uninspired by the end,\u201d Grey says) \u2013 there\u2019s another method to its madness. In a sort of generation overload update of Brian Eno\u2019s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Grey imagined the music playing in a slick modern cityscape \u2013 \u201cthese third spaces where people gather, like malls and airports and supermarkets\u201d \u2013 before making the songs to fit it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI would go there every day, bounce the beat and just jot down lyrics,\u201d she says. \u201cI 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, \u2018OK, people are going outside and stuff.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Ironically, Grey doesn\u2019t necessarily want her music to live in those spaces. Despite tours with 100 Gecs and Porter Robinson, and collaborations with Danny Brown and Oklou (\u201cHarvest Sky<\/a> is the biggest song I\u2019ve ever been a part of\u201d) that have moved her work to a bigger orbit, Grey\u2019s not trying to be pop\u2019s next main girl.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think so, I think there\u2019s a limit for me,\u201d she says of her pop ambitions. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Like much of her generation, Grey is a self-aware student of pop. They\u2019ve seen what stardom did to Britney<\/a>, to Justin (Bieber<\/a> or Timberlake<\/a>, take your pick), and \u2013 God forbid \u2013 to Chappell<\/a>. Even Charli XCX \u2013 pop\u2019s great outsider, who took over the charts on her own experimental terms \u2013 has retreated from music<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very inspiring thing to be like, \u2018anything is possible\u2019,\u201d says Grey of the pop landscape after Charli XCX\u2019s unprecedented mainstream takeover. \u201cBut I think at that level there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel there\u2019s 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\u2019t want that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n 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\u2019t raised religious, Grey and her brother attended an Episcopal school and went to church three times a week.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Episcopals are the chillest denomination, so it was pretty open,\u201d says Grey. \u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were always instruments around the house,\u201d Grey recalls. \u201cHe played, I don\u2019t know, psych-rock or something. And he did really well, he was signed. He had one album on Elton John\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n After high school, Grey attended the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University\u2019s Tisch School of the Arts for two years. Dad must be proud of her musical success. \u201cYeah, he checks the stats a lot,\u201d Grey laughs.<\/p>\n On Do It, Grey playfully dissects her obsessive relationship to music, warning a potential partner that she\u2019s \u201ctryna run a business here\u201d and can\u2019t risk love getting in the way. On Music, she\u2019s comparing a crush to harmonies and BPMs, revealing exactly what\u2019s on her mind even when matters of the heart are involved. Has she had to start thinking about her priorities a lot more now?<\/p>\n
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