A Key Card for Everyone: underscores' U and the Joy of the In-Between

Words by Matt Keenan

Underscores, photo by Bailey Krawczyk

There's a hotel room somewhere that looks exactly like every other hotel room. Same lamps, same carpet, same view of a parking lot or a skyline that could be anywhere. You've stayed in it or maybe you haven't, but you know the one I’m thinking about. April Harper Grey — the musician, producer, and songwriter who records as underscores — loves it there. Genuinely. No irony.

Grey has built her career on the kind of music that makes complicated feelings make sense — and with U, her third album, she's made thirty-four minutes that sound exactly like that fluorescent, weightless, nobody's-watching feeling. She's calling it "music for malls, airports, hotels, supermarkets." She means it as a compliment. So do we.

It traces back, she's said, to being six years old and her grandmother convincing the Hotel Gansevoort to let her peek inside one of the rooms. One of the best days of her life. A child standing in a doorway, looking at a room that isn't hers, feeling the specific wonder of a space designed for everyone and therefore somehow belonging entirely to her in that moment. U is that feeling, pressed into nine tracks of some of the most confident electronic pop you'll hear this year.

This is a different underscores than the one who gave us Wallsocket in 2023 — that extraordinary concept album that built an entire fictional American town out of folk-punk and hyperpop and populated it with suburban anxieties and slasher-film imagery. That record demanded immersion. It wanted you to live inside it. U wants something simpler and in some ways harder to pull off: it just wants you to feel good. Really, genuinely, no-asterisk good.

She wrote and recorded most of it on the road — hotel rooms, backseats, airplane tray tables, borrowed studios in cities she was passing through. You can hear that in the music. It has the energy of someone who has stopped waiting to arrive somewhere and started enjoying the movement itself. Opener "Tell Me (U Want It)" sounds like a PC Music cover of a Katy Perry hit, which is both exactly what it sounds like and completely inadequate as a description. "Music," the second track, takes what a Skrillex interpretation of a Timbaland beat might feel like and makes it into something that sounds like it always existed. Everything on this record signals to something familiar and arrives somewhere entirely new.

The love songs — and most of U is love songs, it turns out, tender ones, euphoric ones, ones that hit different at 2am — feel like they were written for the person next to you on a long-haul flight. Someone you'll never see again. Someone you might love a little bit anyway, just because you're both here, suspended above the clouds, temporarily freed from your actual lives. Grey wrote this record partly to remind herself why she does this. A career in music, she's said, can sometimes suck the fun out of music. U sounds like someone finding their way back to the reason they started.

The music video for lead single "Tell Me (U Want It)" — which Grey directed herself, iPhone in hand — has her stealing a mysterious USB stick and running a spy caper across New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, scene friends Jane Remover and fraxiom appearing along the way. It is genuinely one of the most fun things anyone has made this year. It looks like it costs nothing and feels like it costs everything, which is its own kind of magic.

There's a version of this album that could have felt slight — pop as escape, joy as avoidance, the in-between as a place to hide. But Grey is too honest a writer for that. The weightlessness on U isn't ignorance. It's a choice. She knows what's outside the airport. She knows the room she's peeking into isn't hers to keep. She's choosing the wonder of the doorway anyway, for as long as it lasts.

The Hotel Gansevoort let a six-year-old look inside a room that wasn't hers, and something clicked into place that never fully clicked back. U hands you that doorway. Whether you step through is up to you. Most people will. The lights are fluorescent and slightly wrong and it feels, inexplicably, exactly like where you're supposed to be.

U is out now via Mom+Pop / Corporate Rockmusic.