Underscores at Aviva Studios

“When people listen to underscores, I want their initial reaction to be, ‘This is ridiculous.’ But the more they listen, they should hear the nuance and the heaviness.” That’s what April Harper Grey aka underscores once said about her music. Sure enough, her latest album U might pass for factory-sealed hyperpop on a first listen, but after a few spins, things get way more interesting.

That factory finish is also kind of the point, though. Inspired by Grey’s lifelong obsession with airports, hotels and shopping malls, U was written partly in the Mall of America. She spent every afternoon for two weeks wandering its concourses, recording voice memos and imagining how her songs might sound bouncing off all that polished floor. It’s a long-running fixation. As a kid visiting her grandparents in New York, she’d turn up with a list of big hotels she wanted to see, and her grandma would ask at the front desk if they could have a look at a room.

She calls the sound “galleria”. In practice, it’s hyperpop stripped of its cartoonish irony and given a luxurious sheen, while holding a lot of other genres inside. Most songs get through verse, chorus and bridge in about two and a half minutes. Lead single ‘Music’ opens with a murmured confession about a wet dream involving the perfect song, then sprints into drum ’n’ bass and a chiptune breakdown that sounds a lot like early Skrillex. That makes sense, given underscores started out as a dubstep project on SoundCloud when Grey was 11.

Under all this, though, the record’s blueprint is late 90s and early 00s R&B – closer ‘Wish U Well’ borrows from Janet Jackson’s ‘Someone to Call My Lover’. ‘Do It’ sounds at first like an early Justin Timberlake single, while ‘Innuendo (I Get U)’ skips forward to his Timbaland years. The album’s most beautiful song, ‘The Peace’, moves on to the late 00s, taking Jason Derulo’s ‘Whatcha Say’ back to the vocoder hush of the song he sampled, Imogen Heap’s ‘Hide and Seek’.

Not that it plays like a throwback. For one the songs rarely end where they begin. ‘Lovefield’ starts as a hushed ballad of plucked-string synths before getting blasted into trance hyperspace, and ‘Hollywood Forever’ flips into its own nightcore remix. The vocals are smothered in AutoTune, and the beats keep lurching into speedy pop-house and squelching acid for an overstimulated world.

It’s this kind of imagination that’s getting her heralded as “pop’s most brilliant brain” by the Guardian and “a key auteur in the future of the genre” by NME. A quick climb: her debut fishmonger was released in 2021, followed by Wallsocket, a sprawling concept album about a fictional Michigan town that crammed brostep, nu-metal riffs and gunshot effects into nearly an hour. At just 34 minutes, U aims more at a pop bible in the mould of Britney’s Blackout, where every song is a hit. Unlike Britney, though, Grey writes, performs and produces everything herself.

The Manchester date has already been upgraded from Gorilla to a room three times the size. To be fair, the city’s shiniest arts space feels a much better fit for this record.