Alex G is the king of the curveball. Half an hour into his latest record, Headlights, the Philadelphia-born indie-rock auteur performs an abrupt costume change, slipping from the wistful acoustic balladry of Oranges into a new outfit on Far and Wide, a nasally theatrical mode that can best be described as ‘Daniel Johnston does Les Misérables’. It’s weird as hell, but it works.
There are no other tracks like this on Headlights. There is little to compare it to across Alex’s catalogue. But in the world of Alex G, that doesn’t preclude a song like this from existing; if anything, it’s all the more reason to lean into the novelty. (On 2022’s God Save the Animals, Alex winkingly channeled ‘00s nu-metal with Blessing, another wildcard of a song that chews up a genre and spits it out reformed.)
One minute, Alex sounds like Elliott Smith. The next, he’s doing Death Grips. The track after that, his voice is pitched an octave up and fried by vocal effects – and that’s all on the same album. An enigmatic artist that shape-shifts with each release, he’s a restless explorer of both sounds and styles, inspired as much by Bob Dylan and Gillian Welch as he is by Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. But, somehow, it all ties together.
When asked about Far and Wide, Alex says that the song lives “in its own world”. I couldn’t think of a better way to describe Alex’s music to a new listener. Over the course of ten albums and fifteen years, Alex has built his own world, one populated by cryptic characters, warped voices and veiled stories, a carnival funhouse lined with twisted mirrors that reflect the contents of his subconscious in unrecognizable shapes.
It’s this singular gift for songwriting that has earned him legions of devoted fans, taking Alex from bedroom-pop obscurity to Frank Ocean collaborations, film scores and touring with Foo Fighters, to critical adoration and major-label success.
Unbridled by outside expectations, Alex’s creative process is guided chiefly by intuition and gut feeling, and – though he now works with a few close collaborators – has historically been solitary, his early releases recorded at home with a laptop and a $90 Samson Q1U USB mic and self-produced on GarageBand. This DIY approach to recording led some to label Alex’s music as “lo-fi”, a tag he’s since rejected, claiming that the aesthetic wasn’t an intentional choice, merely a result of working with the only equipment he could get his hands on.
“I couldn’t get the music to sound very big; if I wanted something to be loud or detailed, it was hard to accomplish that illusion with a single mic,” Alex tells us, recalling how the limitations of his set-up compelled him to “make the music interesting in other ways”, pitch-shifting vocals, double-tracking guitars or rejigging chord structures until they did something unexpected. “Learning how to do things myself was pretty exciting,” Alex says, acknowledging that he found a kind of freedom in the way DIY recording allowed him to capture ideas the moment they appeared.
As a self-described “control freak”, Alex was initially reluctant to invite others into his process, but after signing with Domino Records in 2015, the label suggested that he enlist a mix engineer to work on the songs that would become Beach Music. Domino introduced Alex to Jacob Portrait, a producer that also happens to be the bassist for Unknown Mortal Orchestra, beginning a creative partnership that’s endured for a decade.
During the making of the albums that followed Beach Music – Rocket, House of Sugar and God Save the Animals – Alex gradually transitioned from the bedroom-based recording heard on albums like Trick and DSU to a more collaborative and professional approach, working in commercial studios with Portrait as co-producer. “We work really well together,” Alex says of their relationship. “Without me having to explain too much, he’s tapped into what I’m trying to accomplish, which often is something that I’m not even able to put into words.”
"Without me having to explain too much, he’s tapped into what I’m trying to accomplish, which often is something that I’m not even able to put into words"
Headlights is Alex’s most slickly produced project yet. Crisp, clear and wide open, its shimmering, introspective soft-rock is rendered with a polish that’s more radio-friendly than any of his previous releases. But it wouldn't be an Alex G record without a few surprises, deviations from the prevailing sound that might prompt a double-take from an uninitiated listener.
Alex tells us that the sound of each of his albums “emerges naturally” as it's recorded, and Headlights was no exception. “It’s just song by song,” he says. “I recorded June Guitar first, then I recorded Real Thing, and then I kept going. As I was writing new stuff, I would go back to the old stuff and tweak it, and I think that process hopefully unifies the thing a little bit – but in general, there’s no vision of what it’s going to sound like beforehand.”
Save for Logan Hotel (which was recorded, as it name suggests, with Alex’s band clustered around a grand piano in Philadelphia’s The Logan Hotel) Headlights was recorded across multiple studios – Philadelphia’s Spice House Studios and MilkBoy the Studio and Rhinebeck, New York’s Clubhouse – but for Alex, the choice of studio space is more a matter of convenience than anything else. “It’s whatever works,” he says. “It’s whatever studio is available when I need them to be; that’s the studio I’ll end up going to.”
Songs typically begin life at home, captured in voice memos or recorded on Alex's laptop – he’s since upgraded from GarageBand to Logic Pro – and are often brought to the studio half-formed. Alex lays down a track's foundations solo before bringing the results to Portrait, who lends an analytical ear to identify elements that might cause problems in the mix. Some parts will then be re-recorded, and Portrait will shape and colour sounds with carefully chosen pieces of gear.
"I couldn’t go into a studio with ten songs, like: ‘okay, I wrote enough songs for the record, now I can go record it.’"
Alex has previously said that he sees himself as more of a producer than a songwriter, a statement that reveals something fundamental about his creative process. “My idea of a singer-songwriter is someone who writes a fully realized song that exists on its own before it’s recorded. For me, the songs take shape as they’re being recorded,” he explains. “That’s why I think of myself as a producer. I’m working it out in the software. I couldn’t go into a studio with ten songs, like: ‘okay, I wrote enough songs for the record, now I can go record it.’ It’s like, ‘let me just record and see what happens.’”
Alex talks us through the lifecycle of album opener June Guitar: “I had a voice memo of that guitar part and vocal melody, and I went to this studio near me called Spice House – there’s an engineer there named Eric Bogacz who I work with. I record the full instrumental over the course of a few sessions, and I’ll do some vocals that work for me.” In between studio sessions, Alex would experiment with the stems at home, making tweaks in Logic and toying with arrangements.
“Once it feels like it’s done to me, I’ll take it to Jacob, and he’s able to identify things in the rough version that are going to be holding back the mix in some way,” Alex continues. “We’ll take them out and then re-record stuff; on June Guitar, we recorded the vocals again and added shakers and piano. I get the songs as close as I can to the finish line, but once I get them to that point, me and Jacob work together and with his help, it becomes something that sounds realized.”
"Sometimes we record, sometimes we mess with the sounds, sometimes we talk, sometimes we space out"
“Studio days are rarely the same twice,” Portrait says, when asked about what it's like to work with Alex. “Sometimes we record, sometimes we mess with the sounds, sometimes we talk, sometimes we space out. Alex is extremely capable in the studio. He has really good ears and amazing intuition. He also has really great restraint and patience for trying things out.” Alex leaves most of the decisions around gear to Portrait, which he says works for both of them. “Alex is really focused on the feeling of the track. Sometimes when artists start thinking about gear too much it can be a distraction.”
“I’m always trying to find a unifying sonic aesthetic for records, especially Alex's records,” Portrait tells us. He points towards a few key pieces of equipment that helped them discover the project’s sound: the 456HD, a 500-Series tape emulator from Roger Mayer, lent warmth and saturation to electric guitars, while a vintage Pultec EQ gave character to bass and vocals. Portrait’s JBL 4333 monitors were indispensable in the mixing stage, which took place over the course of a week in his basement and Brooklyn studio.
No piece of gear was more important, however, than the Universal Audio 177. A ‘60s vari-mu tube compressor, the 177 is something of a collector’s item, sitting in the same product line as Universal Audio’s historic 175B and 176, the first purpose-built compressors designed for studio recording. “I think I ran nearly every piece of audio on the album through it,” Portrait says. “It took forever”.
Portrait says that the choice of mic for Alex’s vocals was hugely important, too. “We went through a lot of different ideas and ultimately every experiment helped us get closer,” he recalls. The pair ultimately settled on three mics: an RCA 44-BX, a popular vintage ribbon mic, a Sony C-800G, a high-end tube condenser, and a trusty Shure SM57.
“With the RCA, the chain was a Neve 31102 into a Pultec and then a LA-2A,” Portrait says. “You can hear that sound on Afterlife and Beam Me Up. I hand-adjusted the peak reduction on the LA 2A while he was singing at times. It sounded too pointy without the compression, but we were really going for an uncompressed sound.”
"There’s a plugin that I put on a ton of the electric guitars that kicked ass"
While Jacob leant on hardware, Alex singles out a stock Logic plugin as instrumental in colouring his guitar tone. “There’s a plugin that I put on a ton of the electric guitars that kicked ass,” he tells us. “It’s the Logic Amp Designer, and it’s one of the presets, Original Nashville. It’s on the track Headlights and Beam Me Up – that cool, baritone-sounding guitar thing that’s going on. We couldn’t beat it for that deep electric guitar.”
I ask about instrumentation, and whether Alex tends to try out new instruments for each record. “Generally, I stick to what I know,” he replies. “For this record, obviously there’s that accordion on Headlights and June Guitar, but it’s not something I’m always seeking out. Usually where I’m experimenting is with plugins on Logic, or finding weird preset keyboard sounds. That’s something I’ve always loved: they’re all over all of my records.”
Alex shouts out his Yamaha S08, a keyboard and synthesizer from the ‘00s, praising the chintzy, uncanny-valley tones of its pan flute and choir presets, both of which can be heard on the project. ”None of it sounds like what it’s supposed to be, but it always sounds interesting,” he laughs. “That’s where I spend my time quote unquote experimenting. I’ll just be flipping through the channels on there, trying to find something that sounds funny or interesting.”
A longtime hallmark of Alex’s production style is creatively processed vocals, which appear on a handful of tracks across most of his records. (On House of Sugar highlight Gretel, Alex pitch-shifted the entire track up an octave to serve as an intro.) “I discovered it while messing around on GarageBand in the very early days, when I was just having fun with it,” he recalls.
“I would be recording stuff and changing my voice just for the hell of it, but then my sister showed me this band, The Knife. Their vocals were pitch-shifted really aggressively; super high, super low, and they’d just sing the whole song like that. I really loved their music and that opened the door for me to experiment with that sound. Singing certain parts with the voice pitched up, it’s evocative for me – it gives me an emotional response that I like.”
Alex deployed the technique again on Louisiana, a noisy, sinister detour into slowcore that warps his vocals beyond recognition. The background vocals were pitched with Logic’s Vocal Transformer, he says, but the lead vocal was processed with Soundtoys’ Little AlterBoy. “It’s pitched up an octave, and the formant is up three semitones,” Alex recalls, noting that they chose to sing into a vintage drum mic with limited high-end response to temper the digital artefacts produced by the pitch-shifting.
It’s outliers like Louisiana, Far and Wide and Bounce Boy – a hyperpop/pop-punk mashup that sounds like someone locked Blink 182 in a room with a synth and a helium balloon – that make Headlights such a captivating listen, reminding us that though he might have signed to RCA Records and outgrown his DIY roots, Alex remains as adventurous as ever, an artist committed to following his instincts wherever they may lead.
Homing in on extraordinarily specific feelings is what Alex does best, Portrait says, and no song symbolizes this more than Far and Wide. Both cite it as a particularly challenging moment in the record’s creation. “It’s an ambitious song – you don’t hear much that sounds like that in 2025,” Portrait says. “There’s a playfulness to it, but it’s not meant to be silly. Getting a real meaningful vocal performance that sat well in the mix took a bit.”
"Eventually I was like: ‘let me just try and do it as ugly as possible', and see what that does"
“I was trying lots of things, because the song has such a specific quality,” Alex recalls. Initially inspired by Frank Sinatra’s Over the Rainbow, it moved through a jazz-inflected and heavily Auto-Tuned versions to become a kind of “country waltz”, a finished product that Alex likens to a song from The Muppet Movie, performed by Kermit the Frog. “I couldn’t sing it in a way that was interesting enough for myself, and so eventually I was like: ‘let me just try and do it as ugly as possible, and see what that does’. Somewhere in that headspace is where I got this vocal.”
“When you’ve made as many records as Alex and you like to push yourself as much as Alex does, finding new ways to express yourself in songwriting and production is hard,” Portrait concludes. “But he loves a challenge. He is up for it, like very few people I’ve met. There isn’t pretense with Alex. He arrives at the moment and makes his version of the moment. That’s what the best artists do.”
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