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. The main struggle has been trying to figure out how to adapt the show,” she says. 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. 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.
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