Within the lead-up to her 2012 opus, Visions, Claire Boucher went on file to profess her love for Mariah Carey and managed to spawn months of indie weblog discourse. The subsequent yr, Stereogum’s Chris DeVille coined “the monogenre” to explain how the mass adoption of subscription-based music streaming had collapsed the long-held essential worth system that privileged the area of interest over the mass. Appreciation for pop music was shifting, fitfully, from a responsible pleasure to the marker of a discerning palate, whereas unbiased artists had been getting snapped up by main labels and customary into bona fide popstars. A decade-plus on, most early beneficiaries of that gold rush have carved out their very own shelters from the turbulent headwinds of A-list movie star, whereas a number of, together with Grimes herself, flamed out. Possibly that’s why it’s nonetheless electrifying when somebody comes up from the underground and says: Screw area of interest—I wanna rule the world.
One will get the sense April Harper Gray is attempting to optimize pop—to unravel for pleasure. Let’s depend up all of the methods the 25-year-old Filipina American pulls on “Inform Me (U Need It),” the opening monitor from her third album as underscores. For one, it’s in 12/8, objectively the finest time signature for a pop music to be in. Then Gray breaks out the “Private Jesus” panting, and the brostep drops, delayed by half a beat for peak pressure and launch, all whereas saving her finest hook for the bridge. “Inform Me (U Need It)” ends miles away from the place it started—with a stuttering, pixelated coda—however every gear shift is barely felt, like rushing down the PCH in a pre-programmed Waymo. On U, Gray closes the style hole on her blond ambition. There’s nothing easy about it.
No rating but, be the primary so as to add.
Wallsocket, from 2023, was a breakthrough by sheer dedication: Blended prefer it was blasting out of Gray’s MacBook audio system, the album forged 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, in addition to Oklou, who tapped her for a duet on “harvest sky,” the stargazing banger of choke sufficient. U performs as if Simon Cowell stepped in to wrangle Gray’s break up personalities and eclectic tastes right into a one-girl boy band. “Do It” pulls from BIGBANG and Britney and Basement Jaxx and likewise comes with bespoke choreography. On “Innuendo (I Get U),” Gray pops and locks by gun-cock samples and squiggles of synth bass. “I wager you’d fuck something with a heartbeat!” she yelps, like a younger Justin (Timberlake or Bieber) who simply acquired dumped for the primary time.
Most songs on U full the usual verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus life cycle by across the 2:30 mark, and half the fun is in discovering the place Gray takes them from there. “Innuendo” and “Lovefield” each get blasted into trance hyperspace. Lead single “Music,” which, paired with its music video, reverse-engineers a mid-aughts iPod industrial, culminates in a chiptune breakdown straight off of Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Good Sprites. And when the great drop lands on “Hollywood Perpetually,” the monitor flips into its personal nightcore remix. Gray produced and wrote U fully on her personal, crafting customized synth patches to faucet into exact emotional valences. “Want U Effectively” is the peak of her Nara Smith-maxxing, as in, “Watch me make Janet Jackson’s ‘Somebody to Name My Lover’ from scratch.”
