Some artists are lifelong students of their craft. April Harper Grey’s work as underscore places her firmly in this camp, blending genres into exhilarating studies in nuanced, unpredictable songwriting. She melded pop-punk and brostep on “Loansharks,” ornamenting it with a flurry of Midwest emo guitars. She constructed a multi-suite epic with “Geez louise,” manoeuvring between turn-of-the-millennium sass punk, saloon-ready country, and bracing post-rock catharsis. For her latest trick, “Do It” takes late-2000s Britney, fuses it with 2nd-generation K-pop’s electro-pop maximalism, and throws in the industrial verve of Jam City’s Classical Curves. It’s an ingenious lesson in pop theatrics.
Much like her previous single, “Music,” the self-produced “Do It” spends its runtime magnifying texture and rhythm. She throws down a four-on-the-floor beat and lets percussive guitars and crunchy synths zip across the soundstage, swaggering like FutureSex / LoveSounds but with f(x)’s chromatic sheen. At the turn of the recent decade, hyperpop artists blew open the doors for genre agnosticism in the Western underground, eschewing snobbery to embrace a love for music in all its forms. Grey’s lyrics emphasise such devotion: She spends the first verse questioning a potential suitor, but sexual kinks and material wealth prove meaningless. When the song mutates into dreamy R&B, she ecstatically proclaims, “I just can’t do it/I’m married to the music!” You can’t help but believe her.
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APPLE MUSIC – DEEZER – SPOTIFY
