Inside the Immersive World of underscores

In the process of building a world, underscores found herself mapping out its every motion. “I have so many flowcharts,” she says on our Zoom call with a laugh. “You have no idea.” The genre-hopping pop artist, whose real name is April Harper Grey, is talking about the ambitious construction of her sophomore LP Wallsocket, and how it tumbled into a level of complexity even beyond her expectations. “I was writing all the different components I wanted to do [on a whiteboard],” she continues. “And then my dad came in and was like, ‘I think your label’s gonna think you’re crazy. I don’t know if they know who they signed.’ It was some corkboard detective, Pepe Silvia shit. I was driving myself crazy.”

The results of all this planning show through in the extended universe of Wallsocket—the titular Michigan town in which the album takes place—that underscores has been doling out throughout the course of 2023. Inspired by a love of rabbit-hole album rollouts like the screenplay and short film companions to Childish Gambino’s Because the Internet, cryptic ARGs like Halo 2’s “I Love Bees” campaign and Cloverfield’s mysterious promotional websites, underscores synthesized a life enamored with multimedia immersion into a creation that feels like a living, breathing town of its own. “I think music has this really incredible ability to transport people somewhere, just by listening to it,” Grey explains. “I don’t know if I’ve fully acquired that skill yet—I think it’s really nebulous and hard to figure out. So I add a bunch of extra stuff to be like, ‘Well, this is where I’m trying to put you.’”

Though she’s modest in her self-assessment, underscores possesses a remarkable ambition and vision at only 23. Take, for example, a fittingly ramshackle website created for the town of Wallsocket, or a town community board detailing a banker’s inside con job—the plot of Wallsocket’s hyperpop-meets-power-pop opener “Cops and robbers”—complete with judgmental reactions from assorted townsfolk. Or underscores’ history of nonchalantly passing out pizza before her live sets, with a deliberately misspelled URL on the box that leads to an unreleased song. (The correctly spelled URL, incidentally, was part of a merch giveaway in the lead-up to the album.)

But the Wallsocket ARG material isn’t just window dressing. In our 45 minutes of conversation, underscores discusses her creative impulses with immense intentionality, always mindful of how her supplementary material acts in service of her thematic aims of tight-knit social suffocation, spirituality and optimism in spite of distress and grief. The energy and focus she exudes at every moment of our interview elucidates the huge leap in sound and presentation of Wallsocket, positioning her as an artist relentlessly eager to chase newer and bolder avenues of expansion. Or, as she jokingly puts it: “Immersion is one of the coolest things you can do when you’re granted more financial resources.”

underscores has always had this kind of creative drive. “Since I was super young, I used to write short stories,” she tells me, revealing her goal of making something with her music that was heavily narrative-focused. After the success of her debut LP fishmonger—a hyperactive blend of hyperpop, dubstep, and speaker-blowing digitized rock—underscores signed to Mom+Pop and found herself finally able to have the means to “comfortably do a ton of extraneous material” that would have been impossible for her before.

Her newfound sense of creative freedom comes through in the scope of Wallsocket as an album alone, well before the several layers of ancillary content are taken into account. The palette of sounds underscores is operating in is wider than ever—somewhere between early Kesha’s snark pop and the sneering electroclash of Peaches on “Locals (Girls Like Us),” before swerving into grunge-pop on “Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” or minimalist club beats against Midwest emo on “Seventyseven dog years.”

Narratively, the record is just as vast, hopping between the perspectives of its residents—a trans girl diagnosed with a rare but benign disease, a stalker obsessed with her every movement, a daughter of a wealthy family and a white-collar money launderer. Each track is a miniature narrative journey in itself, with only a fragment of its complete plot ever explicitly disclosed lyrically. Though underscores has shied away from referring to the album as “conceptual” in the past, she assures me that she’s okay with people calling it a concept album. Her reasons for that hesitation? “The narrative is pretty broken,” she says, breaking out into a laugh. “It’s kind of just stuff I wanted to talk about, and then I tried to fit it into a narrative.”

In following underscores’ emphasis on theme over plot, we quickly end up discussing the roles place and stasis play in defining us and our relationships with others. Though Grey grew up in San Francisco (which she sees as “a very idiosyncratic city” for how it divides and embodies the separate landscapes of California), she was drawn to the “pastoral vibes” of Midwestern cities like Wallsocket. “I really like these wide open spaces,” she tells me, “and how they’re so easily accessible from cities. There’s some areas like North Dakota, which I saw on tour for the first time, where the second we passed the state limit, it was just this flat nothingness for pretty much the entire time. There’s a lot of mundane parts in this country that are very beautiful and gorgeous.”

Part of her choice to set Wallsocket in the Midwest came from wanting a sense of confinement on the record. She brings up how she likes centering whatever she’s doing on a location—such as the New Jersey seaside town backdrop for much of fishmonger and its companion EP boneyard aka fearmonger—and the landlocked nature of much of the Midwest was perfect for her tonal aims. “I wanted the story to feel suffocating,” she bluntly puts it. “That’s a common emo throughline: ‘This town is killing me. I gotta get out of here.’” It’s a thread that emerges throughout Wallsocket, from the spare, Smashing Pumpkins-homaging stalker song “You don’t really know who I am,” to the hyper-specific burns only bored suburban teenage girls who see too much of each other can dole out on the 2000s-Madonna-meets-Kylie-Minogue electropop highlight “Old money bitch.”

underscores takes care to bring up the album’s eventual resolution in this context too, which finds all the main characters start to leave Wallsocket, set on finding their own way through life: “‘It’s a little too tight-knit, a little too insular. For my own good, I need to get out of here.’” But she’s also just as quick to mention that nothing in her lyricism is inherently tied to this specific region: “I don’t have that many personal ties to the Midwest, but I think a lot of the themes I’m touching on could have been put into California or Florida. I think I could have put that anywhere and it would have made sense. Everyone has that shared experience of wanting to leave where they’re from, or knowing too many people, or feeling like they’re being watched at every step. The experience we go through of leaving where you’re from is universal.”

As our interview progresses, it feels apt to bring up another, more covert piece of Wallsocket’s worldbuilding: how prominent horses are. Part of the lore involves the town’s economy being built on horses, and they pop up throughout the record accordingly, like in a verse on “Locals (Girls Like Us)” about betting on losing horses. Though underscores also points out that dogs and fish make appearances lyrically as well, she draws my attention to the horseshoe on the album cover and a recurring thread in interviews about how Wallsocket, in part, deals with horseshoe theory. “When I first brought up the idea of the horseshoe theory,” she says, “I didn’t really dig into it at all, and I think people were like, ‘What the fuck is she talking about? I don’t hear this anywhere.’” But she explains that much of the record—and her work in general—explores the nature of extremes, in terms of personal beliefs, viewing others, and outlooks on life.

“I was viewing a lot of things in my life as a horseshoe,” Grey continues, “where it’s really good to be one of the extremes, because it’s almost worse to be centered, in the middle, where you’re stagnant.” She mentions how themes of apathy and feeling stuck made their way into the record, along with a focus on “middle/upper middle class ideology and insularness” that the project hinges on. “Old money bitch,” one of Wallsocket’s singles, confronts this directly, with the aforementioned stalker Mara relentlessly bullying the title character for her upbringing in opulence that she tries to camouflage to fit in. “When you get these vignettes of how Old Money Bitch is thinking [on tracks like ‘Shoot to kill, kill your darlings’], I wanted it to be this very empathetic, nuanced approach to a complicated topic,’ she says. “And then with the song ‘Old money bitch,’ where it’s the character Mara roasting this girl for something she can’t really control, it’s just like, ‘Oh, this is no nuance. This is hypocritical.’

But all this talk about horseshoe theory extends to underscores’ ways of adjusting how she’s thought about herself and the world over the years as well. She talks about being sent an image of “the horseshoe theory of loving and hating” by a friend, with “everything sucks” and “everything’s great” at either end, and “everything’s mid” in the middle. “‘Everything sucks’ and ‘everything’s great’ are so close to each other,” she elaborates, “that all it takes is a flip in your mindset. That’s what I was going through with this project. A couple years ago, I was in this ‘everything sucks’ [mindset]—super sad.” With a wide smile, she adds, “And then I just kind of realized, ‘Oh, nothing matters! We’re good! We can do whatever we want!’”

It’s this flip in mindset that brought about the relatively positive outcome most of the characters of Wallsocket experience, even after many of them experience severe tumult and trauma. “I was surprised how many happy endings there ended up being,” underscores remarks. She singles out “Johnny johnny johnny”—an electropop track where the trans character S*nny is groomed by an internet stranger—specifically. Though the song doesn’t shy away from the horror of the situation, underscores offers another way of looking at its resolution, which finds S*nny rebuking her abuser after their first in-person encounter: “She escapes the situation, physically unscathed.”

Somewhere along the development of Wallsocket, Grey tells me, her more optimistic side emerged, shifting the course of the record. “There’s a lot of moments where I really wanted to go down that [route of], ‘I need to devastate people.’ And then I hit a moment where I was like, ‘That might be irresponsible.’ If there’s kids looking in the music for something they can use for themselves, I should provide some sort of hope at the end of it.” She reiterates her feelings of using her voice as an artist responsibly even more succinctly: “I wanted there to be some sort of playbook for how to write your own happy ending out of a situation.”

Without pause, underscores quickly relates this to another big theme of Wallsocket: religion and spirituality. Her characters frequently confront their own beliefs in God and relationships to organized religion—such as S*nny’s disillusionment with God’s penchant for cruel irony on “Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”—and this too is something underscores drew directly from her own life. “There’s something really beautiful about living your whole life with hope,” she says. “If you’re so against people hoping for things, then you kinda suck,” she adds with a giggle.

After asking to hear more about how Grey’s upbringing informed this thread, I learn that she was raised by parents from religious families, though they didn’t raise her to be religious. Regardless, she still went to an all-boys Catholic school for nine years, which involved going to church three times a week. In her words, “It was definitely a huge presence in my life,” even if she says it didn’t permeate her family dynamic as much as she knows it does so many others. “I think the whole album was me reckoning with figuring out if I wanted to return, or if I felt represented with God,” Grey reflects. “I think I believe in God, or some sort of higher power. I also understand how easily corrupt organized religion can get. But it’s important to hope for something. To know that there’s something holding your hand through life is a really beautiful thing. Why wouldn’t you want to believe that for yourself?”

As we find ourselves discussing how underscores’ identity and background inform her music, it feels apt to ask—as a trans woman myself—about how her perspective as a trans woman seeps into her writing. She’s forthcoming with her initial reservations about being upfront about it: “I shied away from writing about being trans in music for a bit. It was kind of a ‘one of the good ones’ mentality—I didn’t want to write about it because I was like, ‘I wouldn’t sink to that.’ Then I realized that’s silly. That’s kind of self-hating. So I just tried to write about the intersections of being trans with other things.”

That approach to writing about her transness came through in two specific tracks on Wallsocket: “Johnny johnny johnny”—“clearly about being a child and reckoning with your gender, and the dangers of having unlimited internet access from a young age”—and “Geez louise,” the henhouse!-featuring centerpiece of the record that deals with gender’s fraught relationship to colonization. “I’m Filipino and, pre-Spanish colonization, there was this third gender where there were a lot of people born male and presenting as female, and they had this shamanistic [presence],” Grey elaborates. “They would help other people interact with the spirit world. When the Spanish came over, it slowly got phased out. And now all my relatives are Catholic.”

“Geez louise” is the most erratic track on the album, shifting from metal to alt-country to shoegaze, often in hairpin turns that use its seven minute span to play with dynamics to the fullest potential. But, like everything else underscores does, it’s all for a larger thematic purpose. “That song was my reckoning with all the emotions that come with this. That’s why it’s so all over the place and frenetic,” she explains. “And that’s why I got my friend henhouse! on it, because we share the same Venn diagram.” In a sense, underscores sees these kinds of explorations as inseparable from her identity, a factor she brings into whatever she makes. “When I was writing this album, I knew there needed to be a trans character,” she adds. “In anything I do, there’s probably going to be a trans character in it. There’s some things I can’t really look at without the intersectionality of being trans and its connection to it.”

As for the rest of the album and any trans interpretations listeners may have? “There are a lot of songs I didn’t purposely write about being trans,” underscores says. “That wasn’t what I was going for, but pick it apart! Do with it what you will! I’m cool with whatever.” At the end of the day, she’s glad listeners are making their own meaning from her music and finding their own personal forms of resonance with it.

underscores is similarly mindful about her overall evolution as an artist, and her place within the new generation of internet pop musicians. “I feel like I’ve been doing different iterations of the same thing every year,” she confides to me toward the end of our interview. “At least that’s how it feels to me. I think I’m just trying to get closer and closer to this ideal project, or this supermusic of all the things I really fuck with in one compact package.” Though her first LP came out in 2021, Grey has been making music as underscores as far back as 2012 or 2013, when she would drop one-off singles onto Soundcloud. She cites her 2018 EP Skin Purifying Treatment as a place where her style really started coming into its own. “Even though that sounds different from the stuff now, you can pick up on a lot of hints. ‘Melodrama’ is the first canon underscores song, and that has a whole guitar section at the end and some weird time signature shit.”

When we pivot into talking about the scene underscores came up in—full of artists like glitchpop-turned-shoegaze musician Jane Remover and noise duo Glaive breaking down genre barriers with each subsequent release—I offhandedly mention an NME profile she had done with a provocative quote about hyperpop being “dead.” “I was probably a little frivolous to call hyperpop ‘dead,’” Grey admits. “I didn’t expect that to become the headline of the article. I should’ve watched my mouth a little bit,” she adds, breaking into a laugh.

What she advocates most for—and seeks to clarify with me—is that “the mentality of trying to create something new that hasn’t been heard before has not died,” even if the sounds, influences, and genres within the hyperpop (or post-hyperpop) landscape grow more and more disparate between each singular artist. “The thing I love the most about music is hearing things where I’m like, ‘You couldn’t have made this five years ago.’ When you see all the people from the scene breaking into different sounds and mashing things together and making things that are super new to them, it’s super inspirational.”

Speaking of her own work, she says she feels confident so long as what she does isn’t just a pure retread: “Nostalgia is a really scary exponential trap that I’m always trying to avoid. I’m scared of just making ‘-revival’ or something. There’s obviously a lot of songs I make that are very 2010s pop, so I’m always very much on the line and scared of stepping too far over it.” Ultimately, her creative impulses boil down to the same things that excite her about her peers in the scene: “My favorite art is the stuff that takes all these bygone sounds and makes something of the year with it. That’s all that really matters to me—that people are still trying to push it forward.”

At the moment, underscores is still pushing it forward until the end of 2023. Our call takes place after the end of her North American tour for Wallsocket—a complete audiovisual experience full of original video components and lore-specific Easter eggs—and just before her now-ongoing European leg. We talk briefly about the striking interstitial videos that visual artist carlosknowsnot made for the set (“Since I was super young, I’ve always been really into the low-poly stuff,” underscores says, “and I’ve been a fan of carlosknowsnot for a minute”), which break the affair up into a surreal narrative somewhere between PS1 survival horror and dark comedy. “When I was younger, I made a ton of silly movies,” underscores tells me about her lasting flair for the visual. “I really wanted to stake my claim for being a visual artist in a similar way that Tyler, the Creator or Paris Texas are.”

She recalls a moment from her experience playing WUNDERWORLD FEST in 2022, and witnessing hyperpop-meets-pop punk artist tsubi club’s set—one that ran a gamut of chaotic, unpredictable momentum and energetic visuals, despite them only having released the track “burbank house” by the time they performed. “That was a real awakening moment,” underscores says reverently. “Like, ‘You can do this? At our level?’ Obviously, I see that at stadium shows. But you can still make things feel that big, even with only one song out.” As for what’s next for underscores after her breakthrough year? “I want to make short films,” she says. She tells me how she wants to continue in the footsteps of the movies she made growing up, now with all the knowledge and practice she’s had in recent years. “I don’t know if I’ll do something as wide scope-wise as Wallsocket going forward,” she continues, “just because there were so many moving parts involved and I ended up getting kind of burned out. But I definitely think I’m always going to try to have some immersive element within the art.”

She pauses, before adding, “I wanna start producing for other people more. I hardly open Ableton for fun anymore, so I’m trying to do more work behind the scenes for other people.” She takes another pause, before saying, “And I wanna make K-pop songs.” To the very end of our interview, her ambition knows no bounds.

Natalie Marlin is a freelance music and film writer based in Minneapolis with writing in Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, Pitchfork and Little White Lies. She was previously as a staff writer at Allston Pudding. She is always at the front of the pit. Follow her on Twitter at @NataliesNotInIt.