underscores writes like someone live-tweeting their own emotional breakdowns with footnotes.
What is underscores's music about?
These songs are about knowing exactly what you're doing wrong while you're doing it. One song frames a relationship as a job interview where intimacy gets graded on metrics like cash flow and car model. Another watches an ex replace her with someone who looks just like her, all while insisting she wishes them well. The self-awareness is cranked so high it becomes its own kind of paralysis. Every feeling gets immediately annotated with commentary about how stupid it is to have that feeling in the first place.
What themes does underscores write about?
She knows better and does it anyway — The narrator in 'The Peace' literally says 'I asked of you a promise I knew that you couldn't keep,' handing cigarettes to someone months into sobriety. It's not ignorance. It's choosing the small betrayal because the alternative is being alone. 'Tell Me (U Want It)' watches her rebuild herself for someone's approval while friends tell her she's in over her head, and she keeps going because stopping would mean admitting she wasted the effort.
Intimacy only works if someone's getting hurt — Connection keeps arriving through combat or collapse. Shared cigarettes become mutual relapse in 'The Peace.' 'Wish U Well' rejects closure entirely in favor of feeling the gravity of losing someone, choosing pain over resolution because at least pain proves something happened. Even 'Music' codes love as the same uncontrollable brain state as creative flow, something that happens to you rather than something you choose.
The body knows before the brain admits it — 'Bodyfeeling' is about someone so good at intellectualizing a relationship that they've trained themselves to ignore every physical warning sign. The title itself names the problem: there's what the body feels and what the mind will allow you to acknowledge, and the gap between them is where the song lives. 'Lovefield' puts a hand on her shoulder and she recoils, then immediately asks if the space between them is shrinking, like her nervous system and her conscious desires are filing separate reports.
Wanting someone who wants you back but nobody moves — Two people circling a threshold neither will cross, waiting for the other to move first. That's 'Lovefield' in full. The 11:11 wishes don't work because wishing is the point, not the outcome. 'Tell Me (U Want It)' begs for validation that never arrives, changing everything about herself while the other person stays silent. The desire is mutual but so is the fear, and fear wins.
She reads the room and plays along anyway — This is Magnetic Fields territory, that same flat affect describing romantic calculation. 'Innuendo (I Get U)' opens with 'Tell me, but don't tell me' because she already knows exactly what he wants and is choosing to perform not-understanding. She catalogs her own inadequacy while hoping she gets picked anyway. 'Do It' frames the whole interaction as a business decision, listing questions like a form she's filling out, and still can't follow through because some part of her knows this isn't actually what she wants.
What makes underscores's writing unique?
What makes these songs work is that the self-awareness never rescues anyone. She can narrate exactly how she's enabling a relapse or stalking an ex or rebuilding herself for someone who doesn't want her, and none of that knowledge changes the behavior. The insight is the prison, not the key. That line in 'The Peace,' 'I don't speak unless I'm spoken to / And I won't smoke unless you're smoking too,' is maybe the best thing here because it names the whole problem: she has made herself so conflict-averse, so dependent on mirroring, that she will betray someone else's sobriety just to avoid being alone with her own choices.