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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\u2014now better known by the name Underscores\u2014would 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I must have been about six or something,\u201d Grey remembers, laughing. \u201cMy grandma would go up to the front desk and be like, \u2018Excuse me. My granddaughter wants to see a room,\u2019 and sometimes they would let us look.\u201d Hotel rooms weren\u2019t the only object of her obsessive fascination\u2014airports, malls, and supermarkets were up there, too. \u201cI don\u2019t know why, but all of those things have spoken to me since I was really young,\u201d 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: \u201cIt\u2019s literally the perfect job!\u201d Grey says with another laugh.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t merely being in<\/em> those liminal spaces that appeals to Grey. She\u2019s 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\u2019s a spirit she\u2019s tried to capture on U,<\/em> her third album, released last week\u2014which also happens to be the 25-year-old\u2019s most cohesive, pop-oriented body of work yet. \u201cIt’s definitely my most accessible work so far,\u201d she acknowledges, though accessible in Underscores\u2019 world still means plenty of quirks: despite its irresistibly catchy chorus, the stuttering pop banger \u201cDo It\u201d sounds a little like a Britney Blackout<\/em> offcut having a panic attack, while the EDM-laced \u201cMusic,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Still, Grey notes, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t necessarily call it a club record. It\u2019s dance-y, but I think it\u2019s made to be listened to on headphones, by yourself.\u201d (By the way, if you\u2019re planning to listen to it on headphones, get your hands on the best pair you can find: the album\u2019s immaculate soundscape\u2014entirely produced by Grey herself, as usual\u2014is really quite remarkable.)<\/p>\n