Marketing music is fairly standardized at this point. You release a lead single and music video to go along with it, announce the album a couple months in advance, release somewhere between one to three more singles, interviews with magazines and radio stations, many social media posts, and everything finally culminates in the release of the album. There is obviously some deviation here, but this is most likely going to be an outline that they follow. Rollouts could also be minimal, but this requires an extremely dedicated fanbase that keeps up with your social media presence. People like Beyonce and Zach Bryan have done this in the past few years by just putting out music with no marketing outside of their social media. Rollouts can also be maximal as well though. Kanye used to be the master at this. He did many things, including everything from hosting a listening party and fashion show in MSG to projecting his face on the sides of buildings across the world to perform his new single. His ability to create maximalist releases is unparalleled, but not everyone has the resources or popularity for that to work. Something that everybody can do for their hardcore fans is to create an ARG.
Alternate Reality Games (ARG) are a newer way of creating a maze through both online and physical places to uncover details about a particular story. An early iteration of this was the marketing for The Blair Witch Project in 1999. There was a website created to make this movie seem like it really was found footage. You could find police interviews, investigators, witnesses, and more about this supposed tragedy that happened in the woods. By the time the movie came out, people were convinced this was real footage and flocked to the box office to see it. It was a huge success! Today, ARGs are closer to puzzles for fans to figure out rather than just more information. A modern example is when Nine Inch Nails did an ARG called Year Zero for their album of the same name. They combined online experiences similar to above, along with hiding USBs at their shows for fans to hide in order to help roll out the album. Nine Inch Nails is also a huge group that is still headlining festivals around the world, but what would happen if a smaller artist created an ARG?
Underscores was immediately one of the most innovative hyperpop-associated artists the past few years after her debut album, fishmonger. After getting cosigns from artists like Travis Barker and 100 gecs, she disappeared for about a year (except for an incredible Lollapalooza performance) to create her newest opus, Wallsocket. There was a 6-month rollout before the album actually came out that included a large ARG. Everything with this story comes from the point of view of Underscores, who is our omniscient narrator for this project. Wallsocket was written in a town of the same name in Michigan while observing the people of the town. Everything revolves around this town, but yet, it doesn’t exist.
Wallsocket is a complete creation of Underscores. It has a government website, its own laws, a fish market, a pizza place, a school newspaper, a forum for moms of Wallsocket, and even a tech company that calls the town home! All of these things have their own website, each of which is interactable, each with its own text, and each with its own layout. All of these websites have led to some revelation about either the world or unreleased Underscores’s music. For example, the pizza place officially opened at the end of July and took five orders from real people around the country. A few days later, they got free merch and a pizza box with a QR Code on it to an unreleased song. The technology website, Secretariat, had multiple levels of logging into an account ran by the former mayor of Wallsocket that led to another unreleased song, this time, a cover of Brittany Spears’s “Criminal”. Speaking of the mayor, before we go any further, we need to establish the characters.
There are three main characters in this story; S*nny, Mara, and Old Money Bitch. All three of them are young adult girls who are trying to figure out where they fit in the town of Wallsocket. Jerry Bowman is the aforementioned mayor whose information was used to find the login on the technology website. Another essential character is Joshua Domingo, S*nny’s father. This story all starts with him embezzling money from the local bank that he worked at for more than a decade. He was a drug addict that when in need of money, decided to steal from the bank. In fact, the entire first song is about the bank robbery and how it happens.
Throughout the rest of the album, we follow the three main characters. S*nny is diagnosed with a disease early in the album before having a reckoning with her religious beliefs after coming to the realization that she is trans. She is also coming to terms with what her father did and how it affects her family. S*nny was also groomed by a man named Johnny, and the song goes into heartbreaking detail about the process of how it happened. Mara is obsessed with S*nny, to the point where she ends up breaking into S*nny’s house after romanticizing her rough childhood. They have a big confrontation about it towards the end of the album. Mara also passes away during a surgery at the end of the album, but is resuscitated on the operating table and her viewpoint on the world is forever changed. Old Money Bitch (OMB) is bashed by Mara for growing up with obscene amounts of money. OMB goes through a severe depression after the previous statement, being unable to process why her friend wants to enlist in the army, and is the effect of the overall life she lives. This depression and extreme apathy gets so severe that she writes a suicide note on the track, “Horror Movie Soundtrack”. Thankfully, the apathy does eventually go away before she can go through with her plan, and she makes it through. At the end of the album, all three of our main characters get on separate trains out of Wallsocket and go their separate directions.
There we go, that’s the album. At its core, it’s a bunch of stories about young girls finding their way in the world. But also, Underscores is playing with deeply personal themes such as sexual abuse, being simultaneously transgender and religious, mental illness, and so much more. Even with the world being completely made believe, she does not shy away from real life issues. And with those issues and so many details surrounding this album, it does feel like a real place. For example, Mara is also a writer on the student run newspaper and did an article about the bank robbery. S*nny is in a TikTok on an account completely dedicated to the town of Wallsocket. She’s asked about the bank robbery and just pushed by the interviewer while trying not to engage. And of course, this world extends into all of the music videos so far, with a specific person set that’s playing each of the three main characters in every video.
All of these details around the album help the album itself feel more real. It no longer feels like something that’s happening in a void. You can now envision the town council because of the website. We know the businesses, schools, people, events, and economy of the town because of the world built by Underscores. Even now, Joshua Domingo is currently going around the country leaving these bags of money at random places. (In actuality, it’s fake money and free tickets to the local Underscores show, but they are advertised as bags of money and have a large dollar sign on the outside.) The world may be fake, but there is enough detail for it to exist. This whole world is not just background information, much of it is essential to understanding the album. In fact, she’s even encouraging people to dive into the ARG at the shows, as she’s playing two of the three songs only found in the ARG live! This is all from an artist who has less than half a million listeners on Spotify and is playing 200 person capacity rooms across the country. Wallsocket is a project of love and passion with the most interesting narrative I’ve heard in and around an album in a very long time.
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