In the lead-up to her 2012 opus, Visions, Claire Boucher went on record to profess her love for Mariah Carey and managed to spawn months of indie blog discourse. The next year, Stereogum’s Chris DeVille coined “the monogenre” to describe how the mass adoption of subscription-based music streaming had collapsed the long-held critical value system that privileged the niche over the mass. Appreciation for pop music was shifting, fitfully, from a guilty pleasure to the marker of a discerning palate, while independent artists were getting snapped up by major labels and fashioned into bona fide popstars. A decade-plus on, most early beneficiaries of that gold rush have carved out their own shelters from the turbulent headwinds of A-list celebrity, while a few, including Grimes herself, flamed out. Maybe that’s why it’s still electrifying when someone comes up from the underground and says: Screw niche—I wanna rule the world.

One gets the sense April Harper Grey is trying to optimize pop—to solve for pleasure. Let’s count up all the tricks the 25-year-old Filipina American pulls on “Tell Me (U Want It),” the opening track from her third album as underscores. For one, it’s in 12/8, objectively the best time signature for a pop song to be in. Then Grey breaks out the “Personal Jesus” panting, and the brostep drops, delayed by half a beat for peak tension and release, all while saving her best hook for the bridge. “Tell Me (U Want It)” ends miles away from where it began—with a stuttering, pixelated coda—but each gear shift is barely felt, like speeding down the PCH in a pre-programmed Waymo. On U, Grey closes the taste gap on her blond ambition. There’s nothing effortless about it.

Wallsocket, from 2023, was a breakthrough by sheer determination: Mixed like it was blasting out of Grey’s MacBook speakers, the album cast underscores as a Shangri-Las ingenue, a pop-punk brat, even a post-ironic Edie Brickell. It put her in league with electropop enfants terribles like umru and Jane Remover, as well as Oklou, who tapped her for a duet on “harvest sky,” the stargazing banger of choke enough. U plays as though Simon Cowell stepped in to wrangle Grey’s split personalities and eclectic tastes into a one-girl boy band. “Do It” pulls from BIGBANG and Britney and Basement Jaxx and also comes with bespoke choreography. On “Innuendo (I Get U),” Grey pops and locks through gun-cock samples and squiggles of synth bass. “I bet you’d fuck anything with a heartbeat!” she yelps, like a young Justin (Timberlake or Bieber) who just got dumped for the first time.

Most songs on U complete the standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus life cycle by around the 2:30 mark, and half the fun is in discovering where Grey takes them from there. “Innuendo” and “Lovefield” both get blasted into trance hyperspace. Lead single “Music,” which, paired with its music video, reverse-engineers a mid-aughts iPod commercial, culminates in a chiptune breakdown straight off of Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. And when the tremendous drop lands on “Hollywood Forever,” the track flips into its own nightcore remix. Grey produced and wrote U entirely on her own, crafting custom synth patches to tap into precise emotional valences. “Wish U Well” is the height of her Nara Smith-maxxing, as in, “Watch me make Janet Jackson’s ‘Someone to Call My Lover’ from scratch.”

It’s not 2012 anymore. Mitski calls Mariah a genius and no one bats an eye. What stone has poptimism left unturned? What recession pop radio hit goes un-reassessed? What about Jason Derulo? “The Peace” is a richly sensory breakup ballad, a flex for Grey’s Ableton prowess, and shamelessly in the thrall of “Whatcha Say.” More precisely, it returns Derulo’s hit to the autotoned zero-G chamber of the song it prominently samples, Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek.” underscores belongs to the first generation of musicians largely unburdened by a prescriptive hierarchy of taste, for whom the only value is memetic value. Taken together, “Whatcha Say” and “Hide and Seek” are a motherlode: The O.C., that “Jason Derulo” Vine, “The Shooting AKA Dear Sister.” Maybe “The Peace” is a joke at our expense, that for three minutes Grey has us taking the works of Jason-fucking-Derulo seriously; maybe the joke is that we should’ve been the whole time.

Grey’s target audience is her fellow obsessives, and beneath its high-gloss surface, every detail on U rewards close scrutiny—even its one-letter title. It might refer to the situationship that “The Peace” traces across three cig breaks. It might just be short for “underscores.” Most of the time, though, Grey seems to be singing directly to the listener pressed up against the other side of the computer screen’s glass. Is this doing anything for you, baby? Pop stardom is a service act, a near-total sublimation of ego in an act of becoming larger than life. At the climax of “Music” Grey exclaims, “It’s everything to me!,” and you can practically picture billions of cartoon hearts flying out of her chest. Listen closely, and there are camera flashes buried in the mix. She’s already plotting her red-carpet debut.