Pop music for an internet-pilled generation
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Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm producer Rihanna Cruz.
I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.
This week, we're exploring the future of pop music and the sound bubbling up from the underground that I've come to label feral pop for its ability to be essentially undomesticated pop music. Pop that's reverted back to its most wild and primal instincts.
Yeah.
Today, we're going to zero in on the singer, songwriter, and producer underscores, and specifically her ability to blend genre and infuse a love for computerized digital sounds into her feral pop work. Let's take a quick listen to a highlight from her latest record, You, the track Music, to show what I'm talking about.
Where Nina Jirachi had a fondness for dial-up sounds from the early internet, I feel like Underscores makes music that sounds like an MRI machine.
You're so right.
If you haven't done an MRI, it's one of those more unpleasant, all these magnets going... That's what I'm hearing in Underscores.
Last time I did an MRI, they let me listen to Lady Gaga as I was getting the MRI. And I feel like maybe the MRI and the pop music I was listening to joined together in my head to make this.
Yeah, it's very industrial coded.
So yeah, right from the beginning, we have this mechanical plotting beat in the background. It stutters as if it's an MRI, as if there's a glitch in the synthesizer programming. It's kind of jackhammer-like, you know, it just thuds away. There's a crunchy hi-hat in there as well.
You had mentioned in our first episode, Sophie as an influence. What I'm hearing is actually the Sophie snare, which are those really metallic FM synth snares.
In fact, that sound you can go and go on Splice and find like the Sophie samples pack. They sound just like that.
The things that the Sophie sample pack has given culture.
It's like if you went into a rundown factory in Berlin that's been shut down for decades and you went around with a metal pipe and hit other metal pipes and they resonated throughout the entire factory. That's what I think of when I hear the Sophie snare.
Yeah, it's very metallic, very industrial. It feels a little bit like maybe futuristic pop trap hybrid. I don't know. There's this digital kick and hi-hat that anchors the song. And even though it's so far removed from what we know as like radio trap music, it feels like what trap music could sound like a hundred years into the future.
Well, one of the things that both dubstep and trap music do is exist in two time domains at the same time. If you're listening to the synthesizer, you're hearing like one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. But if you're listening to the kick and the snare, you're hearing one, two, one. So both halftime and a faster tempo happening simultaneously.
Then there's the highly auto-tuned vocals and even the way the voice gets kind of chopped and screwed at certain moments.
Yeah.
I can totally hear how this is indebted to the sound world of trap music, even if it's not lyrically similar.
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