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.)