underscores

Wallsocket (2023)

Wallsocket sets its songs in a half-real, half-invented version of a small Michigan town, using that fictional geography to hold together a record that otherwise jumps between hyperpop distortion, pop-punk energy, and country-inflected melody. "Locals (Girls like us)" is one of the clearest distillations, blending a twangy melodic hook with glitchy, maximalist production in a way that shouldn't cohere as well as it does. "Johnny Johnny" and "Uncanny Long Arms" show the record's range, one more anthemic, the other stranger and more fragmented. It's an unusually cohesive record for a genre often defined by its restlessness, held together by a concept as much as by any single sonic signature.

Sleeve notes

Wallsocket · 2023

underscores is the recording name of April Harper Grey, an American musician who emerged from the same loosely connected, largely online scene of young producers — often labeled digicore — that also produced artists like Jane Remover in the early 2020s. Her early full-length, Fishmonger (2021), mixed hyperpop's distorted, maximalist production with pop-punk energy and unusually direct emotional writing.

Wallsocket (2023), a loose concept album set in a fictionalized version of a small Michigan town, broadened that palette considerably, pulling in country and Americana textures alongside the glitchy production that had defined her earlier work. The album was widely treated as a breakout for underscores specifically and for the broader wave of internet-native hyperpop and digicore artists she'd come up alongside. She has continued releasing music at a steady pace since, working across a wide range of collaborators from that same scene, including labelmates and peers she frequently credits directly rather than treating as mere genre neighbors.