Underscore: U Review – A super-fantasy author with the smartest pop wit | Pop and rock

ABrielle Gray is an American bedroom producer who is beloved by an impressive array of other artists – experimental pop duo 100 Gecs are fans, as are rapper Danny Brown and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker – but until now it’s been difficult to pinpoint her exact niche. It’s a challenge to sum up the sound of the debut album she recorded under the name Underscores, 2021’s Fishmonger, or its follow-up, a concept album about three young women residents of a mythical Michigan town called Wallsocket: there was really a lot going on in both. But if you had to come up with a short description, you might prefer hyperpop meets emo pop-punk, a sonic cocktail that, as you might imagine, has sometimes proven a little too flavorful for its own good.

There was no getting around the highly caffeinated pop excitement evoked by their best work, however, as Woolsocket bombarded you with distorted guitars, stuttering vocal samples, pounding bass lines, rave electronics, nu-metal beats, screaming shoegaze synths, gunshot sound effects, vintage video game whistles, and drums that split the difference between the pulse of the dance floor and the double thunder of hardcore. Punk-ish, with vocals delivered alternately in a vulgar pandemonium or a full-throated, heavily distorted shriek, there were certainly moments when I wished Gray had pondered the wisdom of the old adage about less is sometimes more.

Maybe I did. No one would call the contents of U a parent class in vague precision. In the first few minutes alone, you get EDM synth noise, heavily auto-tuned and chopped vocals, the sound of a DJ playing a record, drowning out a silence punctuated by laughter, and a back-echoed drumbeat over which Gray repeats the title of the opening track, Tell Me (U Want It), in the kind of hoarse, menacing whisper with which teenage campers tend to address teen campers in horror films, shortly before stabbing the owner of said whisperer. Them with the implementation of the garden. It is then noted that we are still dealing with an artist who has a thing for extremes and overload.

But despite this, a certain degree of downsizing has occurred. “U” sounds less unsettling than her previous works, perhaps as a result of a distinct musical shift. The emo/punk influence is more or less absent: there’s a faint hint of it lingering around the raucous percussion of Bodyfeeling and The Peace, the latter a song you can somehow imagine set to distorted guitars, rather than Imogen’s flawless Heap-ish collection of sampled sounds. Instead, U’s musical north star seems to be late ’90s and early ’00s R&B, the fertile, experimental period dominated by Timbaland, the Neptunes, and Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins. You can pick out echoes of that era everywhere, from the glossy No Scrubs-y acoustic guitar samples that weave through Hollywood Forever and Wish U Well, to the staccato vocals and spare, crashing percussion of Innuendo (I Get U) to Do It’s Synth Synth Blare, a distant, noisier relation to the sound that drives Justin Timberlake’s Sexyback.

Gray is certainly not the only artist to look to the genre, of that era, as a source of inspiration, but her approach to it works very well: tricked out with AutoTune overdubs, dubstep electronics, and beats that keep shifting gears to speedy pop and chatty acid lines, she makes it sound thoroughly modern, not a retro recreation. Moreover, lowering her voice at least a little more clearly reveals what a skilled pop songwriter she is, something that would have been easy to overlook amid the aural bombardment of her previous work. A true auteur – everything on U was written, performed and produced by her – you find yourself thinking that Bodyfeeling or Do It are the kind of songs that other pop artists would happily pay large teams of professional songwriters huge sums of money for.

The lyrics also sound a little softer compared to her previous work. The story behind Wallsocket was so complex that its construction apparently required the use of flowcharts and whiteboards — or “some detective bullshit,” as Gray puts it — but the songs here stick very quickly to the theme of love, albeit expressed through some winning original conceit. Peace charts the progress of the relationship through a series of shared cigarettes; Hollywood Forever and Do It cleverly consider the subject of dating while being at least somewhat popular: “Am I on Your Playlist?” The latter demands. “Do you have Spotify?”

It would be nice to suggest that turning everything down to 11 has resulted in an album that could shift April Gray from the realms of moderate celebrity — a critically acclaimed artist deep in pop music’s left — toward a more mainstream kind of stardom. But trying to predict these shifts is a fool’s errand in 2026, and besides, she’s probably happy where she is, completely in charge and working according to her own plan. It’s a plan that seems to be coming: U is certainly a more interesting, accomplished, and better-written pop album than most major pop artists have put out recently.

Alexis listened this week to

Kim Gordon – Leave it alone
Kim Gordon seems more preoccupied with modern pop than any other alt-rock star of her generation: as Let Go’s mix of trap-influenced beats, feedback, raw electronics and distinctively annoying vocals proves, she can do it without losing part of her personality.