Dream Architecture: underscores on building her third album, ‘U’

Inspired by the synthetic gloss of airports, hotels and shopping malls, underscores’ latest album – her first since an attention-grabbing collaboration with Oklou on Harvest Sky – transports her glitchy electro-pop to liminal, urban spaces where dreams and waking life coalesce.

The Mall of America is a colossal, sprawling structure in Bloomington, just north of Minneapolis, with soaring ceilings, glass panels and bright white floors that shine under fluorescent LED lights. When it first opened in 1992, local residents described it as an eyesore, but its hyper-commercial architecture is what drew April Harper Grey there to write U, her glitzy, frenetic third album as underscores. 

She would spend every afternoon for two weeks moving through the crowded space – the largest shopping and entertainment complex in the US – recording voice memos, jotting down lyrics and imagining how her music might inhabit this environment. She wanted to write an album that captured this organised, transient chaos, transmuting its liminal, glistening artificiality into textured hyperpop, where sounds push up against each other like bodies in a crowded concourse. 

Grey has long been fascinated by the interplay between real-world, commercial spaces and imagined, idealised ones. “When I was a child, I wanted to live in a hotel or an airport,” she says, recalling how she used to visit her grandparents in New York armed with a list of hotels she wanted to visit. “My grandma would go up to the front desk and say, ‘Excuse me, my grandkid really likes hotels, can we go up and see a room?’ Then we would go up and see the rooms.” The feelings of adventure and possibility that stirred in her then continue to thread through her tactile hyperpop today.

A similar sense of searching restlessness appears on U, with its glitchy, shifting soundscapes that veer in unpredictable directions, echoing the fragmented instinctiveness of dream logic. “I often have dreams where a hotel is connected to a supermarket is connected to an airport,” Grey explains. “It’s this dream architecture that I’m talking about.” 

Through dreams and memories, these liminal spaces have taken on a strange romance for Grey. They feel at once hyper-commercial and nostalgic, existing in a vaporwave-like universe where synthetic surfaces shimmer with possibility. She calls the sound of her new record “galleria”, framing it as an album shaped by the uncanny comfort of consumer architecture. 

“I wouldn’t consider myself a romantic person,” she admits, “I don’t know what falling in love feels like, but I feel more romantic about concrete things or products. It’s always been that way.” These feelings shine through on U’s lead single, Music, which opens with a confession murmured over a hammering, metallic rhythm: “Last night, I had a wet dream about the perfect song.” Desire here is mediated through pixelated, Auto-Tuned vocals and the song’s descent into sprinting, breakbeat-driven drum ’n’ bass. Emotions are engineered with architectural precision. This is a love song, but music ultimately triumphs over human connection. 

Through some heavy-hitting collaborations, Grey has quietly left her mark on some of the most exciting corners of contemporary experimental pop. Yet despite her wide net of collaborators, much of her music has been forged in isolation. A dominant force within it is the vague, sprawling loneliness of modern life – a feeling she tapped into on her first two albums through the lens of fictional teenagers raging against suburban monotony. 

U is inspired, instead, by homesickness, by the search for a feeling and a place you can never get back. Growing up in San Francisco – “a beautiful city”, she says – Grey was both drawn to and repelled by west coast tech culture. She is pessimistic about tech’s future, yet romantically attached to its artefacts. “I find a lot of beauty in the way certain products are packaged,” she says, referencing the 2005 iDog, a dancing robot dog that lights up to music. Now living in New York, Grey feels “a little sad” whenever she returns to San Francisco. “It’s a literal ghost town. You have all these Waymo cars where there are literally ghosts driving the car. And all of these tech people that go to work in Mountain View are renting all these places but not staying there.”

Growing up, Grey attended an all-boys Episcopal private school – an experience she surprisingly looks back on fondly. “It was really fun singing hymns with everybody,” she recalls. “I’ve been to a lot of concerts where it feels like a similar religious experience. The emotions of it can feel very divine.” 

At school, she played piano and drums in the jazz band before going on to immerse herself in electronic music from her bedroom. She started underscores as a dubstep project on SoundCloud at 11 years old. She balanced it with her schoolwork, but it was never just a hobby. “I was deeply embedded in the SoundCloud infrastructure,” she says. “I went in knowing that this was what I was going to do. I’ve been very one-track minded since I was young.” The same obsessive curiosity that drew her to shopping malls, hotels and airports was channelled into underscores from the outset, shaping both her sound and herself. 

Aside from Skrillex, early influences ranged from the shimmering, provocative pop of Madonna and mid-2000s Britney to the sugar-rush energy of Korean girl group Girls’ Generation. These elements combine to give Grey’s work a breathless, kinetic energy that balances immediacy with technical experimentation. She credits 100 gecs for showing her there was a hunger for the kind of weird, distorted music she wanted to make.

While tinkering on SoundCloud, Grey formed a community with other young producers, including the global electronic collective Six Impala, which she co-founded in 2017 alongside Canadian electronic producer K//////ATT, Argentinian musician SCRIPT and Finnish electronic artist HELVETICAN. In 2019, they released their first album together, RUBBER ALT. “In a couple of weeks we’re playing a show in Japan where we’ll all meet for the first time,” Grey says. “It’s going to be crazy.”

SoundCloud provided a vital creative outlet and entry point into the industry, but after a decade deeply enmeshed in it, Grey wanted her music to find a wider audience. Her debut album, fishmonger, was released in 2021, and it was validating to see the rich inner world she had built in her bedroom with online collaborators be so warmly received. 

Those early involvements with online collectives paved the way for collaborations spanning avant-pop to experimental rap. In 2021, she joined 100 gecs on tour, cementing her proximity to one of hyperpop’s loudest mainstream moments, before contributing production to i care so much that i don’t care at all, the 2023 debut album from fellow SoundCloud-raised prodigy glaive. Later, she worked on Danny Brown’s Copycats, a high-speed collision of alt-rap and maximalism, which appeared on his 2025 Stardust album alongside collabs between Brown and hyperpop contemporaries like Frost Children and Jane Remover. 

However, it was when Oklou invited her to work on Harvest Sky – the twilit, clubby single from the French singer’s 2025 album Choke Enough – that Grey felt genuinely “starstruck” for the first time. “It was like a fever dream,” she recalls. “We had talked about the concept, which was hearing this party from afar and not necessarily going to the party. Conceptually, we were aligned.” 

Both Grey and Oklou take the well-trodden theme of childhood nostalgia and distort it through distance, alienation and the ghosts of half-forgotten memories. A mist of nostalgia hovers throughout Grey’s latest album too, evoking childlike wonder and curiosity. She looked back to her earliest influences to focus on creating a kind of “pop bible, like Britney’s Blackout, where every song is a hit.” 

Her lyrics on U – exploring love, desire and consumerism – feel playful and tongue-in-cheek, delivered in pitch-shifted vocals or quiet whispers. Even at its most polished, the record doesn’t abandon Grey’s signature experimentation. If U is a pop bible, then it’s one with flickering lights and scuffed edges. Its maelstrom of ornate hyperpop textures collide as Grey constructs feelings of confused desire from grating percussion, pixelated ripples and Auto-Tuned vocals. 

Elsewhere, digital artifice is offset by the raw reproduction of ‘real-world’ sounds. The album ricochets from the brash confidence of opener Tell Me (U Want It) to the soft vulnerability of chiming synths that mimic the sound of plucked strings on Lovefield. Album closer Wish U Well merges wistful, strummed acoustic guitar with electronic intercom beeps, radio static and dial tones. 

There is an ambivalence on this record that feels like a departure from the teen angst of her previous outings. “Now that I’m 25, I just want something that’s nice to be in and escape to,” she says. “I wanted to be a little more shameless with this record. It feels way more luxurious.” 

Throughout underscores’ music, there is this tension between fantasy and reality, shame and desire. She is enjoying inhabiting this silver-plated dream of commercial perfection for now, using it as a canvas to stretch the limits of her pop imagination. 

To Grey, hyperpop might feel more “designer” now, but her music still carries the messy, maximalist spirit of the internet music scenes she grew up with. Her sound shifts unpredictably, like moving through interconnected rooms in a recurring dream, following curiosity down strange hallways or across sprawling terrain – then, upon waking, striking out with total clarity.