Most musicians drop an album, post some moody promo shots, and call it a day. underscores is not most musicians.
The 26-year-old artist - profiled in the winter 2025 issue of Dazed - is doing something far more ambitious and, honestly, far more interesting. Rather than the standard album rollout (single, press tour, repeat), underscores is building out entire fictional universes that exist beyond the music itself. Think less 'here's my new sound' and more 'here's a whole world, good luck navigating it.'
Why this actually matters
Look, artists adopting new images is nothing new. Bowie did it. Gaga did it. Your favorite SoundCloud rapper did it with a new face tattoo. But there's a difference between a rebrand and genuinely constructing narrative architecture around your work. The latter takes a certain fearlessness - specifically, the fearlessness to make something that might look a little weird, a little rough, a little... 'bad.'
And that's kind of the whole point. underscores is leaning into the beauty of so-called bad art - the stuff that's imperfect, unpolished, and completely unbothered about whether you get it immediately. It's an approach that feels like a direct antidote to the hyper-optimized, algorithm-pleasing content machine that modern music can sometimes become.
The art of not being perfect
There's something genuinely refreshing about an artist who isn't trying to sand down every rough edge. The 'bad' art philosophy isn't about being sloppy - it's about valuing authenticity and creative risk over digestibility. It's the difference between something that feels alive and something that feels like it was workshopped to death in a focus group.
In a landscape where every release feels engineered for maximum streaming performance, an artist building strange, sprawling fictional worlds and embracing the messiness of that process is, weirdly, a radical act.
underscores might just be making some of the most interesting creative moves happening in music right now - precisely because they're not trying to make the most optimized ones.
This piece draws on underscores' profile in the winter 2025 issue of Dazed magazine.
