When April Grey was a kid, her parents would make an annual pilgrimage from San Francisco to New York City to stay with her grandparents. Before she left home, the musician—now better known by the name Underscores—would draw up maps on sheets of paper of all the sights she desperately wanted to visit on that trip: Not the Central Park Zoo or dinosaur skeletons in the museum, it turns out, but hotel lobbies.
“I think I must have been about six or something,” Grey remembers, laughing. “My grandma would go up to the front desk and be like, ‘Excuse me. My granddaughter wants to see a room,’ and sometimes they would let us look.” Hotel rooms weren’t the only object of her obsessive fascination—airports, malls, and supermarkets were up there, too. “I don’t know why, but all of those things have spoken to me since I was really young,” she says. Most bizarrely, perhaps, despite the grueling slog of having worked as a touring musician for the past five years, the appeal of those spaces has lost none of its shine: “It’s literally the perfect job!” Grey says with another laugh.
It isn’t merely being in those liminal spaces that appeals to Grey. She’s also fascinated by the way we listen to music in them: headphones in, zoned out, the ambient feeling of a busy world swirling around you. It’s a spirit she’s tried to capture on U, her third album, released last week—which also happens to be the 25-year-old’s most cohesive, pop-oriented body of work yet. “It's definitely my most accessible work so far,” she acknowledges, though accessible in Underscores’ world still means plenty of quirks: despite its irresistibly catchy chorus, the stuttering pop banger “Do It” sounds a little like a Britney Blackout offcut having a panic attack, while the EDM-laced “Music,” which draws a clever parallel between the thrill of writing a perfect song and a flirtatious frisson, erupts into a hair-raisingly aggressive breakdown at the end, all dubstep wobbles and pummeling drums.
Still, Grey notes, “I wouldn’t necessarily call it a club record. It’s dance-y, but I think it’s made to be listened to on headphones, by yourself.” (By the way, if you’re planning to listen to it on headphones, get your hands on the best pair you can find: the album’s immaculate soundscape—entirely produced by Grey herself, as usual—is really quite remarkable.)
Grey first began writing music under the name Underscores when she was just 12 years old, and her first, largely instrumental EP was released all the way back in 2016; over the following years, she continued to drop singles and EPs sporadically, experimenting with a head-spinning array of genres—dubstep, future bass, emo, indie rock, techno, shoegaze, you name it—while tentatively introducing her own vocals into the mix. But it was the release of her first two full-length albums—2021’s Fishmonger, a scuzzy hyperpop record she wrote during lockdown, and 2023’s Wallsocket, a sweeping concept album that leaned further into indie rock—that brought Underscores to wider recognition, leading to collaborations with Danny Brown, 100gecs’ Dylan Brady, and a memorable feature on “Harvest Sky,” a standout track from Oklou’s acclaimed 2025 debut album Choke Enough.
Following the success of Wallsocket, Grey decided to give herself a small break from Underscores by trying to write “accessible pop songs” for other artists—“I thought they were so good and no one was taking them,” she laments. (Whichever pop stars those tracks were sent to, and didn’t take them, will probably be kicking themselves after hearing the killer hooks on U.) “None of them went anywhere or did anything, but I think after that I was a little more in the pop mode,” she adds. While that pop sensibility did bleed into U, the album also feels, in many ways, like an amalgamation of all the different phases of her career so far. (The single-letter title could even be read as it being a self-titled album of sorts.) “The only thing it’s probably missing is a bit of guitar,” she says. “But I think it’s a good thesis statement of who I am as an artist.”
It also serves as a showcase for Grey’s increasing confidence with her voice, which no longer comes heavily manipulated and buried under layers of synths. On the glossy stomper “Bodyfeeling,” which could have been a hit for The 1975 in a parallel universe, her vocals glide effortlessly between the intimacy of the verses and the belt of the chorus; on the equally gorgeous, bittersweet ballad “Lovefield,” she embraces a gentler, even fragile register, as she sings of the torturous confusion as a relationship hovers between the platonic and romantic: “It hurts for me to wait on you / I bet you’re waiting on me too.”
What prompted Grey to really let her vocals shine this time around? “When I was 16, I was like, ‘I’m never going to sing,’” she recalls. “I just didn’t think I had a good singing voice. And I don’t necessarily think I do now—but I think it’s important for me to do it myself. I want to create art that is as 100% me as it can be.”
You can sense that growing self-assurance in the visuals surrounding the record, too. While she doesn’t appear on the U artwork, the excellent music video for single “Tell Me (U Want It)”—arguably the album’s most straightforward pop track, with its tale of romantic yearning and fizzing chorus—sees her take the lead in an “iPhone spy movie,” stealing a mysterious USB drive from a stranger then being followed on a cross-country chase. (It also featured cameos from some of her cutting-edge pop compatriots, Jane Remover and Fraxiom.)
She describes it as her version of a “three-wig video” in the vein of Britney’s “Toxic” or “Womanizer” visuals, here done in a more lo-fi Underscores way. “I’m very type A about a lot of things, so I’ve been trying to force myself to do everything very, very last minute,” she says of trying to make sure the visual world surrounding the album feels as instinctive as the music. “It’s all very off-the-cuff—just trying to go with whatever my first thought is, because that was probably when I was the most passionate and excited about it. And I want to stay true to whatever that was.”
The same goes for her fashion, which has a ’90s flavor, but is very much Grey’s own—with a few pieces lifted from her mom’s closet, though. “The fashion stuff doesn’t come that easily to me, but my family’s very fashionable,” she says. “So I’ve been wearing a lot of her clothes over the past few years.” And of course, I have to ask about her hair in the “Tell Me” video, which features the outline of headphones reverse-dyed over her ears. She had the idea, then was delighted to Google it and realize nobody appeared to have done it before—but then quickly realized, after trying out the hairstyle, that “the reason no one’s done it is because it’s a ridiculous amount of upkeep,” she explains, with a sigh. “But it ended up feeling like a perfect symbol of the album, in a way.”
While she may have written the music with headphones in mind, after giving it a listen, you can’t help but think that, given some of those floor-shaking choruses, it’s the kind of music that could fill arenas, too. As her star has risen fairly rapidly over the past few years, does she hold pop star ambitions? “I think what a pop star is has changed a lot over the past 10 years,” she says. “And it’s cool that a lot of the biggest pop stars that we have right now are being very honest about what it is to exist as a pop star, what the drawbacks are. And I think it’s really cool to see different kinds of people say that they’re a pop star—and mean it in their own way.”
After a pause to consider it further, she continues: “I mean, I definitely feel like a pop star, but I don’t necessarily have aspirations for Madison Square Garden or something. I really like the size of my shows right now. I like being able to go outside and not get recognized at all. There are things that I really value about the life I’m living currently. I obviously want to push myself as far as I can go, but I don’t think I have what it takes to be a grade-A pop star or something. I’m super down to be C-list the rest of my life.” If U is anything to go by, the universe may have other plans.
