Underscores Finds Beauty in the Spaces Between at Emo's Austin
Written by Lorenzo dela Cruz | June 22, 2026
Photos by Lorenzo dela Cruz
If hyperpop's first chapter was about breaking pop music apart, Underscores belongs to the artists helping put it back together. The genre's early innovators thrived on distortion, excess and experimentation. Songs often felt intentionally overwhelming, challenging traditional ideas of what pop music could sound like. But artists like Underscores have helped usher the genre into a new era, one that embraces emotional storytelling, recognizable hooks and genuine accessibility without sacrificing the creativity that made the movement exciting in the first place. Rather than rejecting pop music, she's embracing it.
Her latest album, U, feels less interested in deconstructing pop than rebuilding it through the lens of someone raised on internet culture, dubstep, K-pop, YouTube rabbit holes and suburban California. The result is music that feels simultaneously futuristic and familiar, which is a large part of why her audience continues to grow.
Much in the same way artists like 2hollis have become entry points into more experimental electronic music for younger listeners, Underscores has become a bridge between hyperpop's underground roots and a broader pop audience. The audience at Emo's wasn't there to witness an internet phenomenon. They were there because the songs connected with them. Fans stood on risers along the sides of the room swinging light sticks throughout the night. Somewhere in the crowd, a lone TWICE Candy Bong glowed among the sea of lights. Which felt oddly fitting.
While Underscores exists firmly within alternative electronic music spaces, there is something undeniably familiar about the experience she creates for fans of K-pop. The emphasis on visual storytelling, audience participation and community feels remarkably similar with the way modern K-pop fandoms interact with music. During "Unlimited Love," text messages flooded the screen while fans collectively formed hearts with their hands. Throughout the set, light sticks bounced in unison.
Artists like Underscores understand something increasingly important about contemporary music culture: listeners no longer experience genres in isolation. A fan can move seamlessly between TWICE, Charli XCX, 2hollis and Underscores without feeling any contradiction. The internet has flattened those barriers. The result is a new generation of pop artists who borrow from everywhere.
The production itself was surprisingly minimal. A microphone. A massive LED screen. Occasionally, a videographer would appear onstage, feeding live footage into the visual experience. For one portion of the show, logos cycled across the screen, transforming her own branding alongside familiar corporate iconography. At times, the visuals felt like a stream of internet consciousness, with advertisements, memes and digital imagery colliding in real time. At the center of it all was the music. A blistering run from "Do It" to "Harvest Sky" became one of the night's strongest stretches. Later, she sat behind an electric piano, reminding everyone that beneath the layers of digital production is a songwriter capable of commanding attention with little more than her voice and a keyboard.
Photos by Lorenzo dela Cruz
Continuing with the unique imagery, airport signage from SFO flashed across the screen. Familiar Bay Area streets appeared. Suburban neighborhoods rolled by. Then came footage of Stonestown Galleria, the San Francisco mall that has become one of the defining symbols of the U era. For anyone familiar with the Bay Area, the imagery felt immediately recognizable. For everyone else, it offered a glimpse into the geography that shaped Underscores' artistic identity.
Having recently watched The Backrooms, I couldn't help but notice how both the film and Underscores seem fascinated by the same kinds of places. Airports. Shopping malls. Hallways. Parking garages. Waiting rooms. The liminal spaces between destinations, that still are places of gathering. In The Backrooms, those environments become unsettling. Familiar architecture transforms into something uncanny. Empty corridors stretch endlessly. Places designed for movement suddenly feel frozen in time.
Underscores approaches those same spaces from the opposite direction.
Throughout the U era, malls, airports and suburban landmarks have become recurring motifs in her work. Rather than portraying them as eerie or isolating, she treats them as places filled with possibility. A shopping mall becomes a coming-of-age story. An airport becomes a crossroads of thousands of lives. The mundane becomes romantic. Watching footage of Stonestown Galleria projected behind her while thousands of fans sang along felt surprisingly emotional.
The mall isn't important because it's iconic. It's important because it's familiar.
It's the kind of place countless young people have wandered through while killing time with friends, developing crushes, imagining futures or simply trying to figure out who they are. The same suburban environments many artists overlook become central characters within Underscores' work.
That perspective may be her most important contribution to hyperpop's progression. Earlier iterations of the genre often felt detached from physical reality, existing almost entirely online. Underscores have helped bring those digital aesthetics back into the real world. Her music still carries the speed and unpredictability of internet culture, but it's increasingly grounded in tangible places, memories and emotions.
In many ways, that's why her work resonates so deeply with younger listeners. She understands what it means to grow up online while still longing for real experiences. She captures the strange intersection where digital life and physical life collide.
Standing inside Emo's, surrounded by glowing light sticks and thousands of voices singing in unison, those visuals felt like memories being shared collectively. By the time she returned for the encore and launched into "1800FUCKOFF," and “Music,” the room erupted one final time, with fans screaming “It’s everything to me!”
Photos by Lorenzo dela Cruz
Despite the visuals, despite the production, and despite the last-minute venue change, the most impressive part of the evening was how much impact one performer could create with remarkably little: A microphone, a screen, and a collection of songs. What once felt like the future of pop music now feels firmly planted in the present. Hyperpop is no longer simply an internet movement. Through artists like Underscores, it has evolved into something more accessible, more emotional and more human.
Follow the Artist:
Underscores:
Insta: @underscores
Spotify: underscores
Youtube: underscores
Website: www.galleria.underscores.plus
