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NATALIE MARLIN: Have you gotten to spend any time here today?
UNDERSCORES: No, we just got here. I wanted to walk around, but there hasn’t been a lot of time on tour to explore. Just a few hours here and there.
MARLIN: It seems chaotic, especially with the aftershows.
UNDERSCORES: Totally. There was one day in Boston where it was signing, show, afterparty, and there were three shows in a row before that. It was brutal. I haven’t gotten to see much of anywhere, unfortunately.
MARLIN: What draws you to the Mall of America?
UNDERSCORES: I just really like the mall. I was obsessed with it being the best place to listen to the kind of music that I wanted to make. I honestly think it was the malls in Asia. I went to China when I was younger. The malls are huge, so I was like, “I’ll go to the biggest mall in America.” It was honestly kind of disappointing because [Mall of America] really is just a normal mall. It’s not anything crazy. The crazy thing is the rollercoaster.
MARLIN: I just clocked “Whatcha Say” by Jason Derulo [playing].
UNDERSCORES: Oh my god. I’m dead.
MARLIN: It’s so on brand [for you].
UNDERSCORES: Hell yeah.
MARLIN: I’m imagining Jason Derulo falling down the four floors of escalators here. Did you have a mall scene where you grew up?
UNDERSCORES: The Stonestown Galleria was the main mall I went to. I was really close to it in San Francisco, and in high school I would go a few times a week. I’m 26, so I caught the end of the mall thing. It’s popping right now, but I don’t know how many kids meet each other at the mall anymore. In middle school, that was a big thing. I just like the idea of a third space that’s really alive. I don’t really like dead malls. It’s not a liminal thing for me. I like seeing malls with people in them.
MARLIN: Did you see Backrooms?
UNDERSCORES: I did, yeah. I really liked it.
MARLIN: Me too.
UNDERSCORES: I started forming my own interpretation, which I’m sure is common, but I thought it was about AI.
MARLIN: Yeah!
UNDERSCORES: I thought it was [about] those people that fall in love with ChatGPT and end up doing something heinous because of it. It’s really crazy to take the idea of the backrooms and use it for that.
MARLIN: Right. Especially for something that wasn’t present when Backrooms started going around.
UNDERSCORES: Exactly. I didn’t follow the YouTube series.
MARLIN: Me neither.
UNDERSCORES: So I don’t know what that fanbase is like. I just assumed it was like a Poppy Playtime eight-year-old kid situation. I was shocked that they would take a bold stance with it. I thought it was really cool.
MARLIN: I had that takeaway too, with the monologue about imitations being better than the real thing.
UNDERSCORES: Or being like, “We don’t have to change.” That’s like if you use ChatGPT as a therapist. I also love to see this first-person, shaky-cam thing with all of these Blender environments on a big screen.
MARLIN: Yeah. I don’t know how much you dug in to it, but there’s behind-the scenes stuff where Kane Parsons is like, “We were filming on our standard cameras and then running it through VCRs to emulate camcorder footage.”
UNDERSCORES: Yeah, it feels very indie. I was very in to that kind of liminal shit for Fishmonger. That was a big thing for me and Ayodeji, who directed the videos. We were trying to find these ’60s wooden walls and we found this abandoned Sears. This time around, I felt almost the opposite. I did not want it to be liminal. I wanted it to be very maximal with a lot of people in it. But because mall culture is dying, it lends itself really easily to be like, “Oh, this is some liminal shit.”
MARLIN: Are you trying to bring mall culture back?
UNDERSCORES: I don’t know because I totally missed the era where pop stars would perform in the mall. The last time I was here, KATSEYE was going to perform. I was like, “That’s crazy. I’m so glad they’re still doing that.” I don’t know if that’s weird for the artists, but I like the idea of it.
MARLIN: That’s mostly what I see here. It’s boy bands nobody’s heard of, or rising K-pop groups.
UNDERSCORES: I don’t think [KATSEYE’s] “Gnarly” was out at that point. But I like the idea of fans watching on different floors over the balcony.
MARLIN: I find there’s a weird liminality in maximalism. Sometimes when I’m in spaces with huge fluorescent lights, it’s overwhelming. Maybe I’m also thinking about that because Marshmello and Bastille’s “Happier” is playing and it sounds so echoey.
UNDERSCORES: For sure. With any environment that someone designed to heighten the consumer experience, there’s going to be something uncanny in the actual architecture. But I really like fluorescent lights. I carry a light fixture on my back in shows. I’ve always fucked with it and the way it casts shadows on my face when it’s overhead. I think a lot of people think it’s really ugly, but I’m super geeked.
MARLIN: Did you have any formative experiences growing up and hearing pop music in malls?
UNDERSCORES: I don’t think so, because the music is supposed to be kind of ambient. I wasn’t like, “Oh my god, this song’s playing.” It’s so ducked down, you can’t even hear it. But that was the first music I fell in love with.
MARLIN: Pop music?
UNDERSCORES: Yeah. I was really into Madonna, Britney, Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, and Christina Aguilera. That was the most formative music for me. I listened to the radio a ton growing up, so that was the bulk of what I listened to until I started branching out. It’s always been the core influence of the records. Even though Wallsocket is more experimental and rockier, it’s still got a pop underbelly. That and electronic music are the root of everything for me.
MARLIN: Has anything since Wallsocket made you want to rekindle that love of pop music?
UNDERSCORES: I was just like, “Why haven’t I done this yet?” It was time to just do it. I wanted to look back at my 20s and say that I tried to do a pop thing at least once. I also just got so sick of the guitar after Fishmonger. Because that did so well, better than anything else I’d done, I felt a lot of pressure making Wallsocket go harder with the guitar. I thought that was what people really valued about me as an artist—fusing guitar with the electronic stuff. It became a rule or something where I had to use it for every song. It’s constricting. To some extent, I think a lot of fans were disappointed to hear [U] because it was missing that. But I was a lot less scared this time around.
MARLIN: So is the guitar-shaped stuff on the album all Virtual Studio Technology?
UNDERSCORES: A lot of it, yeah. There’s a couple songs that have guitar, like “Hollywood Forever.” “Bodyfeeling” has guitar, but it’s not necessarily the leading thing. There’s a lot of acoustic guitar. Some of that’s real, like on “Do It,” but it serves a different purpose. It’s more like percussion. All of the guitars on U are more in the back. But when “Bodyfeeling” came about, it was the end of [making] the album, and I liked the idea of having a guitar moment.
MARLIN: When did you first pick up guitar?
UNDERSCORES: It was around Fishmonger.
MARLIN: That tracks based on how electronic the really early stuff was.
UNDERSCORES: Totally. And I definitely felt like a poser every time I was making guitar music. I was like, “I was never in a rock band, so I have no claim to this.” So this album felt a lot less poser-y. I didn’t feel as much of an imposter making it.
MARLIN: Have your listening habits stayed pop since you put the album out?
UNDERSCORES: I think so. I haven’t been listening to any music on tour. I just haven’t had time. But my intake changes depending on what kind of record I’m making, which might be a fault of mine. It’s almost like studying for a test. For Wallsocket, I was listening to a lot of old country shit. It was a lot of Jason Isbell and Drive-By Truckers. For this record, it was FutureSex/LoveSounds and Brandy.
MARLIN: FutureSex/LoveSounds being as big as it was [in 2006] is so wild to me. It doesn’t sound like anything else.
UNDERSCORES: It’s so strange.
MARLIN: The number of songs that are basically two songs stapled together.
UNDERSCORES: They’re eight minutes long. It might be a top three pop bible for me. I hate to give Justin Timberlake too much credit, and if I had to choose between Britney and Justin, it’s obviously Britney all the way. But there’s something really special about that record because it was just Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, and James Fauntleroy. Besides “Damn Girl” with will.i.am. I fucking hate that song.
MARLIN: That song sucks.
UNDERSCORES: It should not be on the fucking album. I skip it every time. They never really hit that stride again because Timbaland started getting way more maximalist, putting way too many layers into shit. But that album is so minimal and confident, and that’s where all of the sex appeal comes from. “SexyBack” has four layers in it. It’s such a weird hit song. I was amazed at how seminal a record that was, so wildly experimental with structure and sounds. It was one of the albums I was really obsessed with when I was six. I had it on CD.
MARLIN: I always think about “I Think She Knows,” where it’s just a few layers and it’s living in that moment for a while.
UNDERSCORES: Exactly. They just let stuff breathe. It’s almost gratuitous. That’s something my friend said about Kanye, that he would put two minutes of a beat at the end of the song for no reason. There’s nothing there. He just wants you to sit in it. I’m very dissimilar as an artist. I like things to be very concise, and there’s only a few moments where I’ll really let go. “Dry Land 2001” from Fishmonger has a four-minute outro where that was strictly off of feeling.
MARLIN: I think part of why that doesn’t happen anymore is algorithmic streaming, getting the song to fit a certain length so it can hit playlist placement. The idea of an eight-minute pop song just doesn’t fly in that context.
UNDERSCORES: Yeah, but I like the idea of it. “Hollywood Forever” is five minutes long and it has this sprawling outro. People at the shows will be going crazy and then, when the outro starts, they’ll really simmer down. That was one where I was like, “I’ll just let this ride out.” I feel like playlists don’t matter like they did in 2021.
MARLIN: Which makes it funny that you have the reference to playlist placement on “Do It.”
UNDERSCORES: Totally. That’s a reason why I’m at this point. Fishmonger was on the Hyperpop playlist, and the Hyperpop playlist was dictating all our income for a minute. I just think it’s not important now. I would really love to hear more eight-minute pop songs. I would love to make more eight-minute pop songs. It’s also a feeling thing. I wouldn’t let it go to eight minutes if it didn’t need to.
MARLIN: Of course.
UNDERSCORES: I like the idea of squeezing everything within the song out of it. Jane [Remover] is really good at doing that. Halfway through “Music Baby,” they change keys three times and then this other hook comes in. That structurally free thing is really inspirational. I’m definitely trying to access more of that and get out of [thinking], “Every song needs to follow the pop formula.”
MARLIN: Right. Because after a while, it can get stale.
UNDERSCORES: People also talk about how, in this decade, there’s no more bridges. You can tell when someone knows a song is finished and when someone just cut the song for playlisting.
MARLIN: Yeah. That drives me insane.
UNDERSCORES: I think PinkPantheress is not cutting songs for it.
MARLIN: No, she’s designing [them short].
UNDERSCORES: Yes. All of the songs feel complete to you.
MARLIN: Absolutely.
UNDERSCORES: I’m sure they do to her, but I think people get mad when songs purposefully cut off before a bridge because they’re like, “There’s all these ideas here. There’s so much potential. Why aren’t you squeezing everything out of it?”
MARLIN: That’s why I love her stuff. She’s a master of brevity.
UNDERSCORES: Exactly!
MARLIN: She knows how to get in and out, get a song wormed in your head, and get you wanting to come back.
UNDERSCORES: It’s the reverse of Justin Timberlake. It’s not gratuitous. She knows exactly how much of the idea [to use]. Once the idea is done, it’s done. It always feels right.
MARLIN: I know you’ve got soundcheck soon, but when you go to malls, what do you hit up most often?
UNDERSCORES: I don’t really hit up anything, I just walk around.
MARLIN: You just vibe?
UNDERSCORES: Unless there’s a Round1, then I go to Round1.
MARLIN: Do you have a go-to arcade game?
UNDERSCORES: I just play Dance Dance Revolution.
MARLIN: Hell yeah. I’m a Ms. Pac-Man girl. Do you have a favorite DDR song?
UNDERSCORES: There’s a song called “Are U Ready?” Whenever I play, I play a BPM set to 140. It feels like shuffling when I’m doing it that way. But that’s a go-to. There’s a song called “You You You,” that’s a good one.
MARLIN: A lot of “U” songs.
UNDERSCORES: That was not intentional. There’s a song called “♡Drive My Heart♡”—that’s not “U”-related at all. But I do the doubles on that one, which is fun.
MARLIN: I hope you get to play some DDR once this tour is over.
UNDERSCORES: Hell yeah, for sure.