April Grey has had the kind of 2026 that requires a publicist and an oral surgeon in equal measure. Her third album U dropped in March, tour dates were upgraded across the board as demand outpaced projections, and then came the call: join Charli xcx's Music, Fashion, Film arena tour as support. She took the call, got her wisdom teeth out, and kept moving. The velocity is real. U is the pivot that makes the trajectory make sense. Grey's first two records — 2021's Fishmonger and 2023's Wallsocket — were critically beloved but willfully strange: Wallsocket was a sprawling rock-adjacent concept album about three young women coming of age, which Grey describes with rueful accuracy as accidentally becoming 'a rock opera.' She is, she clarifies, a jazz band kid, not a theatre kid. The distinction matters. After feeling misunderstood by Wallsocket's reception, she decided the next move would be a deliberate pop record — nine love songs, a discipline she'd never practiced. What she made sounds, in Grey's own description, like 'a mid-2000s Now That's What I Call Music! compilation as recreated by Aphex Twin' — which is as good a production brief as you'll read this year. The Britney-meets-Oneohtrix Point Never construction that critics have reached for isn't wrong: U is compulsively listenable in the way peak-era pop is, but the production decisions underneath are genuinely strange. It's a tight record by an artist who has internalized weird enough to make it feel comfortable. Grey grew up in San Francisco during the tech boom, the daughter of a musician-turned-startup-guy and a teacher-turned-jewellery-seller-to-royalty. She started making music seriously at 12, after hearing Skrillex. The future bass scene coalescing around Shawn Wasabi and the Nest HQ label in the mid-2010s gave her a local community until, she notes drily, 'everyone left because they got priced out.' The arc from that scene to Charli xcx's arena circuit is not the obvious one, but it's the honest one: Grey was always chasing something bigger than the underground would contain. The love song project on U was partly therapeutic. Grey describes having 'issues with showing affection or intimacy' growing up — something she had to actively work at — and the album is the artifact of that work. She pushes back on the Gen Z lovelessness thesis: 'I feel like there's a lot of love to be had. Maybe we're having less sex because it's scary or something. That might be true.' The deflation in that last sentence is the whole voice in miniature. Meeting Skrillex — her childhood hero — at a dinner a month ago was the moment she clocked that she'd crossed into a new tier. He was inclusive, curious, easy. She was shy. She is now 26, she notes, and has decided shyness is no longer an option. Charli xcx's example helps: 'At a level like hers, you worry that anybody under that scrutiny will turn into some kind of diva, and she's not like that at all. It reminds me to check myself when I get diva-y.' Grey is funny about this. The self-awareness is not performed. The UK and Ireland tour runs 9 to 16 November, starting in Dublin. Whatever rooms she plays, the trajectory is clearly upward. 'If I think about it too long, it starts to make less and less sense,' she says. 'But I gotta be ready for anything.' That readiness — anxious but real — is the thing U actually documents.
