By: allie hoffert

Sunday School takes another look at a classic album worth revisiting years after its release. EMMIE staff handpick releases that shaped a genre, defined a generation or deserve a little more recognition. Keep up with Sunday School for your weekly dose of dusted-off classics + throwbacks that merit a second spin.

From “Our Town” to “Twin Peaks,” the contrast between the pleasant façade and uncomfortable reality of small-town America has captured the interest and neuroses of generations of artists. Singer-songwriter-producer April Harper Grey (known mononymously as underscores) added to this canon in September 2023 with her sophomore album Wallsocket. A genre-bending concept album centered around the coming-of-age of three girls in a small Midwestern town, Wallsocket’s surreal narrative holds a funhouse mirror to the absurdity of the Middle America of the 2020s and the people that it creates.

On April 21, 2023, underscores posted on Twitter an architectural diagram of a house and a horseshoe, accompanied by two paragraphs:

I got to take the past year off
I stayed in this town called Wallsocket for a while by myself
It’s this super small town in Michigan
And the longer I stayed there, the more inspired I got
I started to write from the perspective of the people I saw there
Trying to imagine what they were thinking and feeling
And the circumstances that allowed them to exist
*Everyone is such a character*

Three months and several surreal teasers later, Grey would announce her sophomore album, Wallsocket. In the announcement, she explained the inspirations behind the album and its themes:

“A lot of the themes of the project can be summed up by taking something natural and trying to sterilize it. At the time of writing, I was obsessed with using the 'horseshoe theory' in an apolitical context. Where in our lives are we so one thing that we wrap back around and become its opposite? That theory is riddled throughout the album.”

Over the course of Wallsocket, underscores plays stage manager to the eponymous Michigan town; against a backdrop of glitchy garage rock, alt-country, and electropop, she introduces to her audience a two-faced bank teller, a lonely stalker, a doomed teenage soldier, a depressed rich kid failing to hide her wealthy upbringing. The cast of Wallsocket is set against the stage of a classically tight-knit Midwestern community, thrown into disarray by an embezzlement scandal and disrupted by the recent arrival of a shadowy biotechnology corporation headquartered just outside of town.

The overarching narrative of Wallsocket doesn’t confine itself to its hourlong run; ARG elements developed during the album rollout add context and detail to underscores’ world. Concerned parents discuss the embezzlement scandal relayed in “Cops and robbers” on the momsofwallsocket.com forums. The town’s official website (wallsocketgov.com) boasts a rich history of horse racing and a prosperous economy. Local grocery store Oxbow’s Market touts its food products as “Quality. Fresh. Edible.” Three music videos (“Cops and robbers,” “You don’t even know who I am” and “Old money bitch”) loosely recount the events of the album; actors play each central character. underscores herself, the only actor to acknowledge the camera, sings along in empty rooms in shots interspersed with scenes playing out each song’s narrative.

It’s been three years since Wallsocket released, and about six months since underscores’ third album U catapulted her to mainstream attention. You’re unlikely to hear about Wallsocket in the same breath as Slayyyter and Charli XCX, or see “Seventyseven dog years” on the same playlists as “The Peace” or “Do It.” Still, three years on, Wallsocket has cemented itself as an eclectic, beautifully-written cult classic, and its high points (like the climactic bridge on “Uncanny long arms” or the melancholy outro to “Good luck final girl”) stand out as some of the best moments of underscores’ discography.

underscores - Wallsocket

By: allie hoffert