The end of September marked a significant moment in music releases. I should rephrase that. It was a significant moment for music releases that I could vibe with. You had some of the year’s best work between Mitski, Chappell Roan, Yuele, and (quite surprisingly) Underscores. This isn’t to say that I disliked Underscores, but “Fishmonger” was a minor favorite at best and a welcomed expansion of my hyperpop playlist. Of course, I was going to listen to “Wallsocket,” but, unexpectedly, it would become one of my absolute favorites of 2023. It has filled a hole that’s grown deeper every week since 100 Gecs’ masterpiece “10,000 Gecs” was released. I need something weird and bombastic, and let me just say… this right here is it.
As I’ve become more entrenched with the album, I realized how difficult it would be to do the album justice in a proper review. So instead, I thought that I’d focus on the most recent single she’s released. It’s one that has been my go-to track on Spotify. The catchiness knows no bounds and I find every element to be a brilliant addition to the tapestry. However, the more that I listened, the more it evolved from a story of pointing a finger at a phony into a complicated character study of a narrator who is projecting her own insecurities on this random woman. As the pre-chorus suggests, she’s an old money bitch, I’m an old money bitch. Are they one and the same?
Before I delve into why I think it’s an intentionally designed labyrinth, I thought that I would mention that this is a common experience on “Wallsocket.” Go to “Locals (Girls Like Us).” It’s another song about toxic cliques that uses simple repetition to twist a few lines to unveil something greater about the narrator’s shallowness. The first verse focuses on doing a survey “about 700 times” before the second contradicts it. There’s a slow evolution around in-fighting and how she’s “rotten to the core.” Given that this is an album about how loneliness and desperation exist within a community, it makes sense that Underscores is doing a slow zoom lyrically from the smiling exterior to the heart aching inside.
I wouldn’t say that “Old Money Bitch is the most complex song on the album but I’d rank it among the most malleable to interpretation. You can simply read it as the story of how a “daughter of a millionaire” is a total hypocrite masquerading as destitute. She is dishonest and infiltrates her surroundings with an artifice that everyone can see through. If you stop there, it’s still a fun song, if a tad too accusatory. After all, who is the narrator compared to this woman? Is it one narrator or is Underscores incorporating a variety of voices to imitate the feeling of walking down a hallway and having everyone gossip about you? No matter how you judge the story, there’s distance in this caricature.
Unless this is trying to suggest a Tyler Durden-esque “one in the same” twist, Underscores never allows the listener to hear from the woman in question. This is all hearsay that begins with a sense of removal. She talks about the “girl against the wall” and knows everything about her. Her parents have had an expensive wedding and divorce. There’s a sense of wealth that exists beyond her. The focus of the first verse is all about the money she is attached to. She has never referenced it nor used it to better her clout. One can’t help but wonder if this is her way of trying to break free of nepotism, or even the potential that her parents actively disowned her. Through indirect lyrics, you’re able to convey so much about this woman that may not even be there. She could be detached because of her ego, or maybe it’s the narrator who is playing into stereotypes of rich people. How does the narrator know this? As she says, “I’m an old money bitch.”
I don’t wish to dissect line by line, but there’s something intriguing about how Underscores progresses lyrically. She is speaking to the audience, spreading rumors that are entirely negative. Even things as mundane as dying one’s hair and wearing secondhand clothing are given a negative connotation. What exactly is wrong with changing one’s look? Why is the narrator so repulsed except to protect her social status by putting the other party down?
I think the chorus works lyrically and sonically in creating the real meaning behind these rumors. By shifting pronouns between “she” and “I,” there is a suggestion that the two characters are much more similar than she lets on. In doing so, it suggests that the narrator is an expert on what it means to be “old money,” as there’s a certain standard that’s not being met. Maybe it’s because of dishonesty or just that the woman is not doing it right. Maybe the whole problem with old money, as with capitalism as a concept, is how it can be exclusionary and promote individual dominance. To welcome her in is to risk losing everything.
Then the transition happens into the chorus which is my absolute favorite moment on the album. Underscores suggests “We better be on our best behavior when she comes back around.” The final section trails off as if she’s a lion in the jungle hunting prey. This allows the narrator to be implied as talking behind her back. As the woman approaches, there’s a need to behave. It may seem absurd that Underscores follows this with a record scratch and a loud “BONK!” sound effect, but I think it explains a Looney Tunes-style head bonk. It’s the jumping from the bushes and ripping the throat of this innocent victim. Metaphorically, the woman is dead. If nothing else, I think this helps to suggest that the real villain of the song is the narrator.
This may be the most abstract part of my theory, but there’s a verse that finds Underscores facing the woman directly. At “Sara’s Sweet 19,” they have a fight about how they don’t relate to each other. A distant voice is heard saying “Whatever” before the verse returns to the gossiping nature the listener has become familiar with.
Sara is the only real person name-checked in the song. It can be assumed that she’s part of the respectable crowd in the narrator’s eyes. Still, we don’t know why they’re complaining about their rich people's problems. I think the lyrical choice is especially fun because while I can understand a birthday being a “Sweet 16,” using the same rhetoric for 19 seems excessive and ridiculous. Also, there’s something jagged about the phrasing. Still, this conveys that they’re both spoiled brats without any life experience. They live in a bubble and the phrase “I know what it’s like” is possibly ironic. While I don’t want to argue that young people don’t have life experiences that inform their worldview, it’s doubtful that the narrator’s comes from someplace difficult. At most, they have a semester or two of college, which even then may have been paid for with generous donations from the old money parents. Maybe the insecurity comes from the pressure for the narrator to succeed and it’s all collapsing underneath her when she has left high school and is realizing that the world doesn’t orbit around her as much as she originally thought.
More than anything, having a section about the “first big fight” suggests that there’s more of an emotional bias informing every decision the narrator has shared. This is less a place of rationality and more the idea that because she’s been wronged, this woman is a bitch who deserves to die. It’s vindictive. It’s insecure. Within this spiraling taunt of “La, la, la” is the sense of smugness that the narrator is fine creating her own delusions. The beats are moody, and her voice becomes hushed as she digs into a darkness that may be her deepest, unspoken thought. After all, I still think there’s a reading where you could suggest that she’s projecting and that this woman is more innocuous.
Another high point in this dance song pastiche is the breakdown. Like everything else, the cries of “You’re the one hiding” could be facetious. Maybe it goes back to the hunter and prey analogy and the narrator is waiting to finish things off. Still, as the beat drops out we’re left with voices randomly shouting, “She’s over here!” There’s a sense of discomfort as everyone tries to escape this trap. Still, somewhere in the desolation comes Underscores’ most sarcastic voice. She talks about the woman’s parents being on Wikipedia and wondering why she’s not at the D.C. school. There’s a sense that the information we have received has been secondhand all along and that maybe we’re getting a warped portrayal. After all, Wikipedia is user submitted and is subject to a few errors.
In the final cherry on top of this cake, the conversation breaks out into a count of “one, two, three…” before “GOOD LUCK” is spoken in a very soft and welcoming way. In the context of the album, this is Underscores’ producer tag, though the way she uses it in every song differs and informs something different in each. It’s more than a sound drop. There’s a genuine effort to make it part of the larger technological pallet. Here, it manages to play like a punchline that is full of insecurity. For the first and only time, the song may extend the woman a sense of help amid this toxic group. Given that it breaks into an amazing guitar riff, there’s a break from what’s come before. Something has come to light and is now pulsating through the track. While there’s no sense of resolution, it still suggests that the woman is clear about how much the narrator dislikes her. The song trails off with “She comes back around…” as if this is a cyclical game.
I love this song and may consider it on a shortlist of favorite songs from 2023. To Underscores’ credit, she crafted the album by herself and has done an amazing job of mixing the digital era with a pop-punk style that is new levels of rambunctious. This may not be the snottiest song on the record, but the pop-punk nature allows for a fun sarcasm to underlie the track. Also, whereas it’s hard for me to buy artists like Olivia Rodrigo using pop-punk because she doesn’t express genuine conflict, Underscores is doing something new and innovative. By using pop-punk to discuss wealth, it’s a nice subversion of expectations. The genre was always for a middle class mentality, and the idea of rebellion throughout fits even if it’s ironic and not the target demographic. It all creates a sense of outsiderness, whether it be the narrator or the woman. Who really belongs in the world of old money?
Again, “Wallsocket” as a full album is incredible and I’d love to do a full review of it. However, I find that Underscores has a dense mythology that makes it difficult to do it justice. She has a Soundcloud prelude about the narrator S*nny that I didn’t have time to check out. Still, the use of samples and glitches within the hyperpop framework gives me temporary hope that the genre could evolve into something more artistic and dense. “Wallsocket” works as a concept record whose story hides in plain sight. I haven’t fully found it, but I do notice that relistens capture something more complicated about these characters. They may seem initially unpleasant, but you have to wonder what made them that way.
With “Old Money Bitch,” I feel that Underscores has created one of the densest character studies on the album. It may sound like a simple takedown, but I’d argue it captures a clique mentality that works from a teen girl standpoint, but also how capitalism isolates everyone, and even how to update pop-punk irony for a modern listener. More than anything, this is just a fun song that never lets up. It’s quick and to the point with several addictive layers. Underscores is also a smart lyricist that I think will reveal something more as this album ages. For now, I continue to wonder if there are any other clues that this song holds. Maybe I’ll find them when she comes back around.
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