Pop prodigy Underscores: ‘I don’t think Gen Z is a loveless generation’

With a sound inspired by the San Francisco tech boom, the hyperpop musician is entering the big leagues, and a slot on Charli xcx’s tour. First she needs to get over her own shyness – not to mention a fear of love songs

The life of a rising pop star: One day, you’re performing your own song with Charli xcx, her dancers emulating your choreography, an arena’s worth of fans screaming along. The next, you’re on a surgery table, with a healthcare professional yanking four superfluous teeth out of your mouth. Even pop stars need emergency dental work sometimes.

It’s all par for the course for April Grey, the San Francisco-born, Chicago-based musician who records as Underscores. Her 2026 has been, plainly, wild: her third album, U, released in March, was met with acclaim and attracted a small army of new fans. Many of the shows on her tour in support of U, earlier this year, were upgraded due to demand, and one expects the bump she’ll get from her current run supporting Charli xcx’s Music, Fashion, Film tour will push her into even bigger rooms. It’s a blow-up befitting the level of ambition Grey put into U, which is a taut, compulsively listenable pop record that sounds like a mid-2000s Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation as recreated by Aphex Twin. “As I was making it, it felt like a very big swing for the fences,” she says. “I wanted it to be big.”

Grey is video-calling from her tour bus a week after her wisdom tooth surgery. (“The swelling wasn’t too bad,” she says. “I don’t even think I got too chipmunky.”) She knew that this year would be crazy – any album release year is, given how much touring and promotion is required to sell a record – but getting the call to join the Charli tour kicked things up a notch. “On my headline tour, many of the shows were upgraded to larger venues, but some weren’t, so there was this whiplash of playing to 4,000 people and then 400 the next night. The main struggle has been trying to figure out how to adapt the show,” she says. “After getting the Charli call, it’s like: ‘How does this look in an arena?’ It definitely is chasing a moving target.”

Grey was born in the year 2000 and grew up amid the San Francisco tech boom. Her father is a musician who was “discovered by Elton John in a bar” but by the time Grey was born, he was “deep in startup world”. Her mother was a teacher, but now has a “crazy job selling jewellery to like, princes and stuff”. Grey “had a very vibrant childhood, and [San Francisco is] a really insane place to grow up … I think there’s an era before the tech boom that people romanticise a lot, but I can look at it now post-Covid and be like, wow, the tech boom, when it was first happening, was the glory days,” she says.

Grey started making music at a young age, but really began taking things seriously when she was about 12, she says. It was hearing the American dubstep producer Skrillex that really changed things. “After discovering Skrillex, I was like: ‘All right, I’m gonna start taking this shit seriously,’” she recalls. From there, she was very “one-track minded” in that she didn’t really do anything else: “I didn’t have other friends, so I was obsessed. Now, I think I have a better work-life balance, but I’m a pretty shy person. But if I’m being honest, I was always very confident about music. There wasn’t really a plan B.”

Away from Silicon Valley, a rowdier group of revolutionaries were congregating in the city, which was quickly becoming a hub for future bass producers such as Shawn Wasabi and the Nest HQ label in the mid-2010s. Grey was a teenager and fledgling producer around that time, and relished the opportunity to see stars of the scene so close to home. “I was like: ‘These people are legends’, and it was such a trip to be able to go to those [events]. I was trying to immerse myself in it, and then everyone left because they got priced out,” she says.

During high school, Grey realised that maybe she should have been spending more time cultivating a social life, as she saw people “going to parties and doing all these crazy things”. “I was like, ‘Damn! I haven’t done any of that shit,’” she recalls. But within a few years, it was clear she was on the right path. After spending a few years releasing brazenly avant garde music online, Grey released her debut album, Fishmonger, in 2021. It was an underground sensation and turned her into a critical darling.

Fishmonger and its follow-up, 2023’s Wallsocket, felt hugely accomplished, but they didn’t have the intense laser focus of U. Wallsocket was a sprawling, rock-adjacent concept album about three young women coming of age, and Grey says its reception made her feel “misunderstood”. “I was almost embarrassed that I had accidentally made a rock opera or something – I’m not a theatre kid, I’m a jazz band kid,” she says with a laugh. “Afterwards, I thought if I was going to try my hand at a pop record, now would be the time to do it.”

On U, Grey tried to write nine love songs, because she hadn’t written many previously. Before, she hadn’t thought that she was even able to. “I just don’t think I’ve really resonated with many love songs in ways that other people have, and growing up, I had issues with showing affection or intimacy. It was something I had to work at,” she says. Even so, she doesn’t buy the idea that gen z is a loveless generation. “I feel like there’s a lot of love to be had. Maybe we’re having less sex because it’s scary or something. That might be true.”

U, with its Britney-meets-Oneohtrix Point Never production, vaulted Grey out of the underground into a more mainstream arena. But it wasn’t until about a month ago – when she met her childhood hero Skrillex at a dinner – that she realised she was in a new echelon. “I was sitting next to him, and he was just really nice, trying to include me as much as possible, asking questions,” she recalls. “I think people like that are just so willing to talk to people, and I’m not as much like that. It’s hard for me to initiate, and I’m kind of realising like, damn, I’m 26. I can’t be shy any more. We gotta cut that out.”

Spending time on tour with Charli, too, has shown her a different side of celebrity and pop stardom. “She is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. She pops in and checks on us, and she’s very supportive,” she says. “At a level like hers, you worry that anybody under that scrutiny will turn into some kind of diva, and she’s not like that at all. It reminds me to check myself when I get diva-y. Like: Charli doesn’t do that, so I shouldn’t.”

Whatever move Grey makes next, it seems likely that she’ll keep graduating to bigger and bigger stages. “If I think about it too long, it starts to make less and less sense,” she says. “But I gotta be ready for anything.”

Underscores tours the UK and Ireland, 9 to 16 November; tour starts Dublin.