The Pop Corporation

It’s strange for old heads to hear the influence of old, glitchy electronic music finding it’s way into new releases that basically sound like pop music. And it’s strange in a good way.

The influence of SOPHIE went overground when Charli XCX announced that, whether anyone liked it or not (and most people did), it was Brat Summer, and a raft of wonky pop kicked the door down in a variety of guises.

And so, to underscores (their lower casing) who have been getting their flowers recently after bubbling away in the undergrowth for a while, with a new release called ‘U’ which is one of the most exciting album releases of 2026.

We stumbled into the excellent ‘Music’, which judders and sputters like a hyper Prefuse 73, all topped off with dreamy vocals, for a wonderful juxtaposition between sweet bedroom pop, and DIY electronica, and better yet, this stuff isn’t shoved toward the margins anymore, and is now full embraced.

Elsewhere on the album, the hard edits and ultra-production is amped up further, with ‘Hollywood Forever’ rattling along at a breakneck speed, with everything feeling like it’s been spliced to smithereens, and put back together for some futuristic version of pop that married Yellow Magic Orchestra and Magdalena Bay.

The whole album has the feel of being so complete, that you need to find out who else is making music like it, in the hope that there’s a scene – burgeoning or fully fledged – to get into. It’s exciting, fresh, the right kind of unusual, and further proof that the kids are alright.

The whole thing is showered in pixel hearts, emoji, long cig drags, glitter, cheap samples, and probably being too cool to smile in photos, and it sounds utterly terrific! At times, there’s an overwhelming amount of information hitting you square in the face, like an old iMac monitor vomiting out a bunch of early ’00s MySpace pages  and low bit rate mp3s, and that’s a good thing – it’s the fantastic sound of throwing everything out in a recession, and to hell with it.

This is surely one of those hip albums made by someone who is going to be an influence on a bigger artist, and we’ll hear the echoes of it in some monster hit down the line. The trick for you is to get on the source material right now, while you have the chance.