Underscores: U review – ultra-imaginative auteur has pop’s most brilliant brain

(Mom+Pop)Performing, writing and producing everything herself, April Grey pares back her hyperpop electronics for an LP in thrall to 90s pop-R&B, with songs that big stars would die for April Grey is a US bedroom producer beloved of an impressive range of other artists – experimental pop duo 100 Gecs are fans, so is rapper Danny Brown and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker – but thus far it’s been hard to accurately pin her down. It’s a challenge to sum up the sound of the first album she recorded under the name Underscores, 2021’s Fishmonger, or its follow-up, a concept album based around three young female inhabitants of a mythical Michigan town called Wallsocket: there really was an awful lot going on on both of them. But if you were forced to come up with a shorthand description, you might plump for hyperpop meets emo pop-punk, a sonic cocktail that, as you might imagine, occasionally proved a bit too flavoursome for its own good. There was no getting around the heavily-caffeinated pop thrills provoked by her best work, but while Wallsocket was bombarding you with distorted guitars, stammering vocal samples, dive-bombing brostep basslines, honking rave electronics, nu-me