Interview by Matteo Pini
Portrait by Chris Maggio

MP  You described your previous album, God Save the Animals (2022), as “a mess of what’s true and what’s not”. With your new album, Headlights, do you feel you are moving closer to autobiography? Unlike some of your other albums, the songs aren’t named after anyone.

AG  It always feels autobiographical even if it isn’t. The songwriting comes from a place of emotional honesty, because if I can make myself feel something, then I know I’m accomplishing something. It’s possible that with each album, I’m getting better at toeing the line between autobiography and fantasy so that the songwriting feels more real, but they both feel the same when I sing. It’s like WWE, where I’m a caricature of myself for the sake of the song. 

MP  Does “Alex G” feel like a character to you? 

AG  Yes, because if someone’s listening to the music, they have a mental image of me that probably isn’t accurate. I don’t think of myself as a character. I don’t sit down and think, it’s time to put on a mask. 

MP  Headlights is your first album for major label RCA after a run of releases at Domino, an independent. Did it change how you approached the creative process?

AG  I’ve been working with my producer and engineer, Jake Portrait, since my 2015 record Beach Music – I gave him the tracks when they were finished and he mixed them. With the following records, I’ve worked with him in a greater capacity. With this record, I’m bringing him the tracks before they’re finished and making decisions based on the work we’re doing together. Because it’s been such a slow process of incorporating Jake into the creative routine, it doesn’t feel any different. RCA has been really easy to work with: I was looking for minimal-to-no interference in the music-making process. I turned in the record, and they said thank you. They’re aware that the people who are going to buy the record don’t want me to do something drastically different from what I’ve already been doing.

MP  There’s no big pop sellout moment.

AG  I’d love to do that! That would be nice if I knew how to, but I don't know where I’d start.

MP  What were your musical influences for Headlights?

AG  I was listening to the Rolling Stones – there’s something about their recordings that feels haphazard, but they are so easy to listen to at the same time. The title track on Headlights has a deep guitar tone that is inspired by “Unknown Legend” by Neil Young. I come back to the 1992 Neil Young album Harvest Moon, too. 

MP  Could you give me any particular sounds on the album that you’d only notice if you were in the room during recording?

AG  I used this old Yamaha synthesiser that I stole from my brother, which has these cool sounds on it: pan flutes, “oohs” and “ahs” and digital voices. For “Bounce Boy”, I was taking advantage of this vocal patch and used it as one of the main percussion instruments. 

MP  One of your early encounters with vocal processing was with the band The Knife. Could you describe the influence of their music?

AG  When I was 13 or 14, my older sister showed me their 2006 record Silent Shout and videos of their live performances. I became obsessed with how the lead singer [Karin Dreijer] would manipulate her vocals, pitching them up and down, embodying these strange characters. The sounds that they use for instruments were very stock-feeling, so MIDI. It’s such a cool, cold vibe because it sounds like there’s no love put into it, but the arrangements have so much love and detail at the same time. I had never heard that in pop music before; the eeriness of it stuck with me, and I’m always trying to emulate it. 

MP  In The Knife’s music and your own, there’s no hierarchy between what is considered sonically “cringe” or “cool”. There is a democratic ethos in how you give voice to different characters within the songs. Is that an active decision?

AG  It’s the privilege of having software where I can look at the tracks and be thinking, the song has gone from point A to point B, and it needs something else. In a song like “June Guitar”, I’d been listening to a lot of Zydeco music, and I was thinking about the accordion because of that. I’m just throwing stuff at the wall until it works.

MP  You’ve composed soundtracks for two Jane Schoenbrun films, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024). What is the process like for working with moving image, and does it affect how you sequence your albums? 

AG  Jane will send me five minutes of the rough edit of the film and say, “Can you capture a suspenseful vibe here, or make this sound like Explosions in the Sky there?” The pointers will be very specific, and usually, it is a very streamlined process. I’ll record my five minutes of music, send it back, and Jane will say, okay, change this or that. I’ll tweak it, send it back, and it’s just that for about a month until it’s all honed in. I lean on Jane a lot for the process because she has a very distinct vision, which I appreciate. It affects my albums, in the sense that I get to explore the craft without any personal baggage. It’s like building with Legos and a set of instructions. I can find new ways to make sounds through that process that I can take into my own music, to fill out the sonic space. There’s less pressure because I’m helping execute someone else’s vision.

MP  Headlights feels more grounded than anything you’ve put out. Do you feel grounded at this point in your life?

AG  I’ve never felt ungrounded, but I look back on times in my life and in hindsight realise that I wasn’t. I don’t really know where I’m at until later in life. In some ways, I am more grounded, and in other ways I’m not. I’m just trying not to fall into a trap of being naive. .