“That was the encore,” grins Underscores as they return to the stage of Camden’s Underworld following a relentless chant of “one more song” from the sold-out crowd. “What do you want to hear?” they ask, quickly scrolling through their laptop before settling on the euphoric call-out of ‘Bozo, Bozo, Bozo’. The gig, Underscores’ first ever headline show in Europe, was billed as their “testing the waters” in front of a new crowd, but from the moment they walked onstage, it’s clear they’re already a master of full-bodied but friendly chaos. Lost shoes and mobile phones are swiftly handed back to their original owners while fans check on each other via thumbs up from opposite sides of the mosh pit as it all kicks off.
The setlist offers a crash course in Underscores’ already-impressive discography. They first started releasing music in 2017, evolving from DIY dubstep through hyper-pop and beyond. They have collaborated with Travis Barker, toured with 100 Gecs and has production credits on a range of records including Renforshort’s ‘Virtual Reality’ and Glaive’s debut album ‘I Care So Much That I Don’t Care At All’.
After a string of standalone tracks and EPs, Underscores’ debut album ‘Fishmonger’ came out in 2021, exploring ideas around celebrity culture through glitching breakdowns, while a more introspective EP, titled ‘Boneyard AKA Fearmonger’, followed a few months later and saw them wrestling with anxiety, existence and generational apathy.
Underscores’ new post-hyper-pop album ‘Wallsocket’ (due September 22) feels like a step up for the artist. Working with a label for the first time in their career, Mom + Pop (Tegan and Sara, Tom Morello) has allowed Underscores to be “overly ambitious” with the new project, they explain.
A concept album set in the sort of Michigan town that even Google Maps can’t find, it’s an album that has the energy of Euphoria meets Desperate Housewives. Every track packs the kind of excitable punch heard in hyper-pop’s best moments, but it pulls from a much wider sonic palette. The extended world around Underscores also continues to blossom, with a string of mysterious websites about ‘Wallsocket’ appearing online, with dedicated fans trading info about the slowly unfurling world via Discord.
Live, it’s those new tracks that connect best with the crowd. Opener ‘Cops And Robbers’ is a turbo-charged garage rock anthem and emotional ‘You Don’t Even Know Who I Am’ channels the angst of the Smashing Pumpkins’ classic ‘Today’, while ‘Locals (Girls Like Us)’ has the entire room moving as one, even though the swaggering single has only been out for a matter of hours.
“It’s an album of belonging,” Underscores tells NME a few hours before the gig. Drinking an iced coffee at Camden Market, Underscores (real name April Harper Grey) admits they have no idea what to expect from the show, but is buzzing for it regardless. “I started out making dubstep music so for most of my childhood, I just assumed I’d be DJing,” they explain. ”Now, I have to sing and play guitar onstage which is super new to me, but I love how the music feels in a physical space.
“Like me, I don’t think a lot of my supporters go to that many concerts so allowing people to have that space is really fulfilling,” they add. “It’s important for self-expression, but also everyone’s on the same level, so we can all enjoy the moment together.”
What was your vision when making ‘Wallsocket’?
“It’s so important to build a world people can get lost in. The whole ambition for the album was to draw people into this world I have in my head. I also wanted to explore just how strange it is growing up in America. It’s this very weird thing where environmental factors like where you were born determine what your childhood is going to be, and what your adulthood will look like after that. It’s basically a huge game of chance.
“‘Wallsocket’ looks at this upper middle class American suburb and asks those difficult questions about who benefits from that society, if people from different backgrounds are able to coexist and how you operate growing up within that community. I was trying to evoke a world that is not unlike the one we’re living in. I wanted it to be super big, wide and ambitious. Hopefully the storybook morals can resonate with people.”
There’s a lot of character play on the album, but would you also consider ‘Wallsocket’ to be a personal album?
“It’s super personal; it’s all me. The album is about a strange pocket of America that I definitely wrestled with throughout my childhood. I figured out what I wanted to write about and then dedicated that to a specific character in the narrative. I don’t see it as a concept album, even though it definitely is. All the songs are there because I had something I wanted to figure out about myself, or things that have happened. It’s a laundry list of things I wish I’d wrestled with five years earlier when I first left home.”
Was it a cathartic record to make?
“The process of making these songs was really hard because it’s like maths to me. It’s a case of trying to figure out the right equation of which parts fit together. Looking back though, it was super cathartic because music is this vacuum that allows me to figure stuff out and get to the centre of what I’m feeling. I’m not too emotional in my day-to-day life, but with these songs I took the essence of whatever tiny emotion I was feeling and magnified it. There are a lot of songs that I’m glad I wrote.”
Credit: Max Durante.
Why is worldbuilding important to you?
“The most important thing to me is immersion. There are people who will just listen to this album and not care about any of the extra shit, which is amazing. I wanted to create something that sounds good on shuffle but also has this insane backstory that people need to go through 20,000 hoops to fully realise.”
“The biggest reason I wanted to work with a label was so I could stretch that immersion further. The main reason I do music is to give people a world to jump into. I don’t know if it’s escapism because it’s so rooted in the real world, but I’m definitely trying to put someone somewhere else. I want other kids who have this need to tell stories or communicate something, to feel like they can.”
There are elements of horror and paranoia across the record but overall it’s quite joyful. Was that deliberate?
“I didn’t really foresee all these happy endings when I started writing about these complex topics. There’s a couple of cautionary tales but at this point in my life, I’m more interested in happy outcomes for the characters or exploring how they figured stuff out and came into their own self. I definitely thought it was going to be a sad, angsty album, and it is, but there’s a lot of hope as well.”
Musically, what inspired it?
“I was really focused on trying to make something that made me feel warm, and a lot of that was country music. I didn’t think I’d be having my country music phase this soon but I wanted to pursue sounds that made me feel things. Lucinda Williams and Sufjan Stevens were huge influences, but so were Beck and Jack White.”
How important has the hyper-pop community been to you?
“I wouldn’t have gotten to whatever point I’m at now without hyper-pop. I think it’s officially dead though. A lot of us in the community are trying to figure out where we go next – there’s some folktronica, some rap. I would never have guessed Glaive would make emo pop or Jane Remover would pivot to drone music, but it seems like everyone is just chasing what feels exciting.”
“What I really liked about hyper-pop was how important it was for a lot of queer music and how it never felt like a revival. There was some nostalgia to it, but it always sounded like 2020. I want to carry that on, take older ideas to create something new. I want everything to feel like hyper-pop, even if it doesn’t sound like it.”
Underscores’ new album ‘Wallsocket’ will be released on September 22 via Mom + Pop
