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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-metal riffs, heaving shoegaze textures, gunshot sound effects, vintage video-game bleeps, drums that split the difference between dancefloor pulse and the double-time thunder of hardcore punk, and vocals alternately delivered in a bratty drawl or a full-throated, heavily distorted scream, there were definitely moments when you wished Grey might consider the wisdom of the old adage about less sometimes being more.
Maybe she has done. No one is going to call the contents of U a masterclass in opaque subtlety. In the first few minutes alone you get fizzing EDM synth noise, vocals that are heavily AutoTuned and cut up, the sound of a DJ backspinning a record, plunges into silence punctuated by laughter, and booming drums dosed with reverse echo over which Grey repeats the title of opening track Tell Me (U Want It) in the kind of hoarse menacing whisper with which teenage campers tend to be addressed in horror films, shortly before the owner of said whisper impales them with a garden implement. Notice is thus served that we’re still dealing with an artist with a thing for maximalism and overload.
But nonetheless, a certain degree of paring back has taken place. U sounds substantially less hair-raising than her previous work, perhaps as the result of a distinct musical shift. The emo/punk influence is more-or-less absent: a faint suggestion of it lingers around the chugging rhythm of Bodyfeeling and The Peace, the latter a song you can somehow imagine set to distorted guitars, rather than its beatless, Imogen Heap-ish assemblage of sampled voices. Instead, U’s musical north star seems to be late 90s/early 00s R&B, the fertile, experimental period dominated by Timbaland, the Neptunes and Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins. You can pick out echoes of the era everywhere, from the bright, No Scrubs-y acoustic guitar samples that weave through Hollywood Forever and Wish U Well, to the staccato vocals of Music and the spare, bumping rhythm of Innuendo (I Get U) to Do It’s grinding synth blare, a distant, noisier relation of the sound that powers Justin Timberlake’s Sexyback.
Grey certainly isn’t the only artist to look to that genre, in that era, for inspiration, but her take on it works incredibly well: further tricked out with AutoTune-overloaded vocals, dubstep electronics, beats that keep changing gear into speedy pop-house and chattering acid lines, it feels entirely modern, resolutely not a retro recreation. Moreover, dialling her sound down at least a little reveals more clearly how skilled a pop songwriter Grey is, something it was easy to overlook amid the aural bombardment of her past work. A genuine auteur – everything on U was written, performed and produced by her – you find yourself musing that Bodyfeeling or Do It are the kind of songs other pop artists would happily pay vast teams of professional songwriters vast sums of money for.
The lyrics too feel a little dialled down 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 corkboard detective shit”, as Grey put it – but here the songs stick pretty fast to the theme of love, albeit expressed via some winningly original conceits. The Peace charts the progress of a relationship through a series of shared cigarettes; Hollywood Forever and Do It wittily ponder the topic of dating while at least moderately famous: “Am I in your playlist?” demands the latter. “Do you have Spotify?”
It would be nice to suggest that dialling everything down from 11 has resulted in an album that could shift April Grey from the realms of the moderately famous – a critically acclaimed artist deep in pop’s leftfield – towards a more mainstream kind of stardom. But trying to predict those shifts is a fool’s errand in 2026, and, besides, perhaps she’s happy where she is, entirely in charge and working to her own plan. It’s a plan that appears to be coming off: U is certainly a more interesting, accomplished and better-written pop album than most major pop artists have dished up of late.
This week Alexis listened to
Kim Gordon – Let Go
Kim Gordon seems far more engaged 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 characteristically disturbing vocals prove, she can do it without losing a fraction of her personality.
