UNDERSCORES - U

If you've lent even half an ear to some of the hottest projects in electronic pop and its surrounding scenes (among the many, a certain “Choke enough” by Oklou and “Stardust” by Danny Brown), the name April Harper Grey, better known as underscores, will inevitably have caught your eye. Not that the young Californian producer and songwriter has only popped up in the last couple of years: already "Wallsocket", a dystopian concept album straddling rock leanings, country residue and abrasive digital lashings, had done the rounds among internet enthusiasts, thanks to its expansive narrative breadth and the unpredictability of its sonic and aesthetic choices. The fact remains that it's only in the last few seasons that the musician's name has started circulating through the heavyweight alt-pop circuits, showing off her prodigious adaptability and recombinant potential.

Arriving after a run of singles that pushed her research further towards the constructs of the popular song, "U" is an album of paradigmatic tightness, a clockwork mechanism offering a faithful snapshot of Grey's rapid stylistic evolution, here skilled at reshuffling her flexible electronic arsenal in light of late-Nineties hi-tech production and the r&b of the following decade.

Even with greater linearity, the feverish spirit of her music remains intact. The lead single, "Music", proves it perfectly, pulling her jagged digital beginnings out of the drawer but dressing them in suitably renewed production: the beat gets even tighter, the bass hits with a frequency that would make Skrillex blush, the hyper touches fragment into a thousand little sonic streams, papering the progression with a diffuse euphoria. Over it Harper builds the most excited melody of her career, the enthusiasm of musical creation intertwined with the thrill of new knowledge. It could have been an excuse to just throw everything at the wall, but the musician's precision is such that the closing climax sublimates the whole sonic jubilation.

This is a hallmark of the whole record, the push towards extreme emotional peaks, the mood swings marking even the same track several times, always stopping just short of excess. "Hollywood Forever" in this sense represents the peak of the entire album, the fulfilment of an aesthetic that knows how to condense the complexity of its sound with a strong emotional imprint. A fierce critique of hyper-consumerism and the hypocrisy of those who point fingers while still taking part in the same social mechanisms, it launches into a sly trance-pop progression, full of chasing timbres and guitar modulations, before an ecstatic bridge shifts its balance and turns the track into a euphoric hyper explosion. The outro, relentless in keeping the BPM unchanged, perfectly captures the aftermath of that earlier exaltation, laying bare all its wreckage.

Even when it doesn't come on with such fervour, underscores' brand of pop rests on solid foundations, fully grasping the mechanics of hits from twenty-five years ago and adapting their logic to an understandably more evolved electronic palette. Tracks like "Innuendo" and "Do It" prove it, time capsules that transpose the lexicon of early-2000s r&b into a prism made of timbral diffractions, sudden ostinatos, and bass coming from every direction. Yet the melodic element always remains central, the strength of a popular communication that, compared to her purely digital past, here comes through in full force.

Drawing on echoes of Fleetwood Mac's Eighties period, "Bodyfeeling" shows all the character of a songwriting style unafraid to bare itself, decidedly at ease even with far more linear sonic patterns. And while the electric swells of "Wish U Well" try to push back against the lyrical flourishes, the track quickly reveals its stature and brings all its painful content to the surface, closing out the whole album with a moment that gives new shine to the Brandy Norwood playbook.

In just over half an hour, underscores makes plain the sheer strength of the production arsenal at her disposal, an operating range that keeps absorbing more elements without ever losing sight of the bigger picture. After acclaim on the independent scene, "U" punches its ticket for far bigger audiences.

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16/04/2026