Switched on Pop - Pop music for an internet-pilled generation

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

This week on Switched On Pop, we’re looking at all things feral pop, the microgenre that takes pop music to its most wild extremes. And no feral pop artist is more tapped into that ethos than underscores. Her music synthesizes dubstep, trance, and Timbaland with ease, and her latest album ‘U’ is filled with boundless energy. She’s already opened up for 100 gecs, PinkPantheress, and Porter Robinson; this fall, she’ll open up for Charli XCX on her upcoming Music, Fashion, Film tour. She said it best on her debut album, Fishmonger: “it’s the new wave of the future!”   Links: ⁠Newsletter⁠, ⁠YouTube Songs discussed: underscores – Music SOPHIE – Ponyboy underscores, 8485 – your favorite sidekick Nelly – Country Grammar (Hot Shit) Madonna – Music Madonna – American Life underscores – Do It Britney Spears – Piece of Me PinkPantheress, Zara Larsson – Stateside Justin Timberlake – SexyBack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, economy. and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-4-3 at O-D-O-O-D-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm producer Rianna 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 Girachi 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 join 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 high 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 FMC. 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 is 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 high 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 100 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, two, three, four. But if you're listening to the kick and the snare, you're saying one, two, one, done. 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. In fact, lyrically, I mean, Nina Durachi was singing love songs at a computer. Underscores is singing love songs to music itself. Yeah, where Nina was singing to a robot, this is a weird metaphor, but this sounds like you're hearing the robot talk for the first time. And it's a robot that can only communicate about feelings in technical terms, right? Like music, BPM, harmony. Like, that's all it understands and it's trying to communicate.

I also love these vocal chops in the intro where it's just making vowel sounds like, E, ah, oh. You know, it really does give the impression of a robot. So who is underscores, Rihanna? So underscores is my age. She's 26 years old, same age as Niajari. And the album, that music is off of you, is her third record. She started her career by making dubstep music.

on SoundCloud in her early teens at the height of Skrillix's popularity, but her breakout moment came in 2021 with her debut album Fishmonger. Throughout her whole career, underscores has been firmly in the bag of feral pop

by bridging genre seamlessly and using this digital computer-heavy focus to push on the boundaries of pop music. In keeping with the computer connections here, Fishmonger is kind of a beta test of the things that we hear later in underscores career on the album U. There's electronic rock-influenced guitars, digitized vocals, and big hooks that ground the tracks. A favorite of mine from Fishmonger is the track, your favorite sidekick.

Fake smile, run it back, guess I never tried it. O-C bubble dose off the cellar side of it. Wink, wing, pick it up. I could be a psychic. Huh. It's giving, um, what is the Nelly song? Shimmy, shimmy cocoa puff? Country grammar, no.

It's the same phrasing. The playful childlike quality of doing, you know, sing-song kids' music. It feels almost Avrilavine-coded even. That's my limb, you know, the pop punky. I'll be your girlfriend. Yeah, the sensitive pop-punky world that we find ourselves in here. And I've been eating toothlaced because you can be a girlfriend. But the kicker of your

ways now I think you drank my cool aid and I've been up for two days But the kicker of your favorite sidekick That sums up the whole Farrell Pop vibe And what she's going for Is in this tag that keeps coming up Throughout the album

It's the new wave of the future It's prophetic, it's shot calling Kind of a proclamation Like we are making music here that is beyond what we know currently pop music to be. I feel like there's no better way to claim your place in pop music than to say, here I am, I've arrived. I got to see underscores a few weeks ago.

I went to a Pink Panther show. It was like a 5,000 person warehouse. I swear the audience was there for underscores. It was the hardest hitting music. The audience was losing their minds. This is two openers before the lead act and the place was passed. hacked. People are really getting onto the sound. So Fishmonger was the debut record. Her second record Wall Socket leaned into darker, more emo sounds and textures. It was more focused on rock music.

Conceptually, it was an album about a town in suburban Michigan and featured a whole internet component, including a fake municipal website and an alternate reality game designed to be poured over among fans on forums and social media, again incorporating these internet sensibilities into her work. But her latest album, You, goes back to the electronic digital pop sounds that defined her first record and turns them up to 11 as we heard on music. As we move from the verse into the chorus, the song opens up, it radically expands. It feels like you hit maximize on a browser window. You fell into the computer videodrome style and are surfing through cyberspace or something.

Like it's going from this insular communication of emotion into these grand big feelings. When I'm with you, it feels like music and the music grows and swells. I find this idea that music itself can be this liberation and this. freedom, very powerful and like very in line with some of the themes that I feel like are now developing in this genre of feral pop that we're identifying, this desire to sort of like escape or rise above the mundanity of life in the 2020s. You know, technology is a way to do that. Music itself is a way to do that. Yeah. And I would be remiss if we talked about a song called music and the core metaphor of music being this lovely, joyful thing that brings people together.

And I hadn't mentioned the connection to Madonna. Yeah, in all this music talk. She, of course, has both a song and an album, also titled Music. What is that final lyric? Music mixed the bourgeoisie and the rebel. I can't tell if this is a collapsing of class politics. The proletariat has risen and taken. over the bourgeoisie, or has the bourgeoisie itself turned into the rebel?

I think the latter, I don't know, I see this is a very optimistic song. You know, I think music is supposed to bring people. I mean, the line before it says music makes the people come together. So that's the read that I have on it, at least. There is no class. Okay. Okay, Madonna. Music came out the year 2000, the same year that underscores was born.

And I can kind of see a thread between music by Madonna and the birth of feral pop in both music's metanarrative lyrically with this idea of music as the conjunction factor and in the production of the song where both musics by Madonna and underscores have manipulation of the synthesizer to be a little bit abrasive and super digital. underscores has spoken on the record about being super inspired by Madonna in the past. And one could argue that Madonna has always adopted all the characteristics of feral pop. You know, I see her embodying. the conflation of genre

and a digital spirit and meta lyrics, especially on albums like music and American life. So it's not too far-fetched to see the Madonna version of music as a foundational text for the whole feral pop sound. Confounding lyrics, we're missing the Skrillex, but this is pre-Scrilex. Right, maybe Skrillux was influenced by Madonna. Whoa.

There's a freaking scoop right there. Very speculative scoop. The Madonna Scrillic Sophie Pipeline. Think about it. It's real. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Back to underscores version of music, the cherry on top is when the soundscape is switched and we have this didactic breakdown of music and genre. There's Skrillex, We don't give up. Yeah. There's every genre. Yeah, we have this massive,

dub-step-y drop after she breaks down pop rock electronic rap rock and roll rock music is twice in there for some reason but the cool connection is that music the song has all of these genres within it you know it has the pop hook it has the electronic sounds and drops there's rap influence percussion as we talked about the way she's also singing in this post drop outro section evokes the whininess of pop punk and emo music Name it, read it, tune it, print it, scan it, fax it, skipry, name it. I love your ability to insert daft punk into every electronic music conversation.

Okay, well, let's give Charlie some credit. I mean, I do think there is this robotic voice that, Rihanna, you mentioned earlier, too. And that is like a really striking feature of this. In fact, one of the fascinating things about this artist is, like, I can't tell what her voice sounds like fundamentally. It's kind of dislocated in this really interesting way that intrigues me. Yeah, her vocal tone is always shifting. And I think a lot of it comes from the breadth of her influences.

There's Madonna, there's Scrilix. That's why I find the underscore is special, especially in this context of furthering this new Faro Pop sound. She's able to combine all these sounds and influences with ease and still turn it into fun, exciting, and unbridled electropop. And what I said about Scrillix last episode is that, He makes music that blends rock and electronics so easily, resulting in a pop song. She's really good at that.

Another song I want to look at on the album U is the track Do It, which is cut from the same cloth as music and is another example of underscores going full feral pop. Spears Blackout. But with contemporary EDM sounds, you're the sampled cash register, the acoustic guitar with the synthesizers is very 2000s, even sort of like Timbalin production or even Destiny's Child used a lot of acoustic guitars like that. So it's spanning decades, genres, references,

all in these little micro moments. Yeah, there's a lot happening in these first two seconds. The song has the same stuttering intro that we heard on music just presented differently. As these vocals on top get pitched higher and higher, and it leads us into this acoustic guitar instrumental. When it comes in, I love, yeah, the cash register sound effects, there's video game noises. I love the Janet Jackson-esque breaths that punctuate the song there. It recalls like a little bit of the tactile nature of feral pop that I spoke about last episode with regards to Nina Jarachi. We're bringing sexy back.

I'm thinking of when we were checking stuff off of our bingo board a couple episodes ago. And we were talking about the revival of Timbalin production. And we brought up Pink Pink, Panthers's song stateside. And I think it's funny that underscores opened up for Pink Pantheras because I do see a similarity between these songs. Oh, yeah, 100%. Very strong, sexy back vibes. And that reference feels appropriate because Timbalin is a producer who really mixes and brings together a collage of unpredictable samples.

Yeah. A lot of his sound is, it's very futuristic, much more so than the sort of 90s, hip-epadish. pop sampling culture that was more nostalgic and looking back to earlier stuff. His sounds were always, where am I going into the future? And that's what I hear with underscores. Yeah, I think that tactile nature is also in a lot of Timbalin production where you could feel the man crafting it as you're listening. You know, like it's beats that were made with human hands, which as I'm saying, sounds ironic because now he's super on the AI train. But the Timbalin that once was was one that I think of fondly for his human creativity. That's because,

so many of his beats were made as beatboxes first, where he makes these weird sounds with his mouth. It's not even good beatboxing. He's just like, whoop, whee-w-bo-bo-bo. And he sometimes leaves those sounds in the mix. So it's that combination of very hyper-digital sounds with those human textures. And that's exactly what you're calling out in Farrell Pop. Another forefather of Farrell Pop, Timbaland. We're creating a Mount Rushmore.

Indeed. Scrillix, Timbalin, Madonna. We need a fourth. Hopefully they'll come. Episode three. As you said earlier, Nate, the vocals are constantly morphing and doing different things. But then right under the wire to call back the idea of Skrillix EDM, the song goes full pop drop. Acid synth.

Oh, here we go. Vocal chops. What's so internet about feral pop too is the flattening of all culture. I feel like these artists look at music so differently than I do. In a way that is like really inspiring, there's no sense of like hierarchy, of temporality, of like things that should or should not be reused and re-expressed. It's like everything is fair game, all of history, all of culture, all global sounds, just like throw them in as you wish willy-nilly.

It's pretty extraordinary. And that way, I feel like this music is indebted to all that EDM and Timbalin stuff as it is to contemporary K-pop. It feels like the unpolished version of K-pop. You hear a mashup of multiple genres. A song that begins with a 2000s hip-hop R&B beat will then turn into an EDM drop. It will incorporate sounds and styles that don't belong in any one place. That is what K-pop does. And I think it's not surprising because I believe that underscores used to be a K-pop blogger.

Oh, yes. Yeah, she's very inspired by K-pop. So as we've been talking about, underscore songs embody the core tenets of feral pop. There's an internet-first language, both sonically and lyrically. There's fealty to dubstep in EDM, as we heard onto it. There's a lot of pop forward writing happening in you, and I think that speaks to, as we said, her love of K-pop, but there is an amalgamation of genre, the pop rock, electronic, rap, rock, and roll that we hear throughout these songs. I see lots of similarities between the work

of underscores and Nina Jarachi. They're at the same age, have the same influences, and they both have a fascination with technology and do a lot of theory-level thinking about what electronic music is. And outside of the music, they're friends. So I can see the influence feed off of one another. Underscores highlights all of these things and shines up. as a pop star, but along with her and Nina Durachi, whose careers have progressed alongside each other in like a helix type formation, there's one other artist running parallel to the two that has had a similar arc growing and overlapping fan base in the past few years while embodying the feral pop ethos. It's the rapper and producer Tohawless, who we will be talking

about in our third and final episode of this series. Tune in tomorrow. Switch on Pop is produced by Randa Cruz, edited by Alyssa Soap, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by R.R.S. Gottlieb, video by Nick Rips. Our theme song is by Zach Tenario and Jossi Adams of Ark Iris. Or a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe at NYUMag.com. Come back tomorrow for more Farrell Pop. People can check out more music on our podcast at switchonpop.com. And until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, rolling spreadsheets. Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's

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