Even when Alex G tells it to you straight, he tells it to you slant. I’m not just talking here about his notoriously stilted appearances in professional interviews, his inability, maybe unwillingness, to explain where his lyrics come from, what they mean, or who they may be talking about. After all, it was Aphex Twin—another long-haired and label-hopping innovator-cum-iconoclast with a set of aliases and a penchant for flipping the script with each new record—who said in a rare 1995 interview-about-interviews : “I just like to make music, I don’t like to really talk about it much, which is why interviews are quite difficult, especially for electronic music.”And despite his prominence in indie rock and its adjacent circles, Alex G himself told Pitchfork in 2022 that he’s got more in common with electronic and pop producers , for his willingness to chop things up in the studio, to craft a final product exactly as he sees fit.

Yet Alex G isn’t facetious in the Richard D. James way; when he doesn’t have anything to say, he doesn’t tell stories about driving around in an armoured tank, he just saves his stories for his songs. Though his now 15-year, 10 full-length studio album career refracts through lo-fi garage rock, singer-songwriter slowcore, electronica, Americana, and film-score-ambient, there’s a certain uncanniness that has united his catalog. He’s been telling it slant from the first couple (hundred) songs he recorded himself and put out on Bandcamp, through his four meticulous Domino LPs, all the way to his tenth album and RCA debut, Headlights, a sprawling record with all the polish of a major label, yet very few concessions made to the powers backing the likes of Justin Timberlake and Tate McRae.

What Headlights concedes to instead, then, is all that came before it. It’s as unlikely that Alex G would be interested in making anything akin to a sellout record as it is that RCA would have taken him on with the hopes of doing any sort of molding. Instead, Headlights comes as an amalgamation of strengths that Alex G has been building his career toward—among them: the twanginess of Rocket, the eerie electronic bent of House of Sugar, the spiritual reckoning of God Save the Animals—sometimes at the expense of the record’s cohesion, but more often united by slants of light, turns of phrase, and honestly in its optimism.

Opening track “June Guitar” reprises the striking simplicity of God Save the Animals’s biggest hit “Runner,” this time complete with modulated harmonies, and an accordion solo, bringing some celtic-style grandiosity to the gentle acoustic strum and grounded vocal performance. It’s a similar balance he strikes on the surreal standout “Beam Me Up,” where Alex G’s singing comes its closest to resembling anything in the perpetually-Jason-Molina-influenced alt-country revival lane as he sings, “I’m gonna put that football way up in the sky,” then corrects, scales up his cosmic sprawl: “I’m gonna put that rocket way up in the sky.”

It is in the surreal where Headlights stumbles upon hope. On one hand, it is a portrait of the artist—to say nothing of Alex G’s perpetually shadowy line between fiction and its auto—navigating the pressures of a major record deal and the precarity of a livelihood as a musician (as he tells it on “Real Thing,” stuck “Hoping I can make it through to April / On whatever’s left of all this label cash”). On the other, Headlights has the sensation that it can transcend its material context, that it can bring Alex G and his listeners both into a place with footballs and rockets in the sky, where a search for authenticity can lead to the impossible, as he sings, “I went out looking for a real thing / Didn’t notice it was hanging by the door.”

This is why he can make a mandolin track as twinkly and bright as “Afterlife,” that eschews feeling commercial, like it could soundtrack a Jeep advertisement. The mandolin is buttressed by a dissonant synth—bright, but almost garishly so—as he sings, “Let me run on / Afterlife / Filling up the tank with it.” Headlights’s songwriting is at its sharpest when it moves toward the realm of the strange, taking abstractions like the real thing and the afterlife and imagining them as tangible, hanging on a door, filling a gas tank. Tangible, therefore possible.

This is not to say that every step Headlights takes into the less-than-conventional is equally effective. Even with its tight, groovy bassline, the experimental “Bounce Boy” feels more like a grab-bag of Alex G-isms—modulated, pitched up vocals, choppy synths, and evasive, off-kilter metaphors à la “My heart in braces / in braces / in braces”—than it does a logical sequitor from the shoegazey, vocoder-influenced “Louisiana” it follows. Molly Germer’s string arrangement on “Far and Wide” closes the track with a stirring uncanniness, a perfect complement to the more straightforward chords that continue beneath, yet the emo-leaning vocal styling feels somewhat out of place, evoking John Darnielle as much as something off the self-titled Twenty One Pilots debut.

The biggest strength of Headlights, still, is its integrity. It manages to be a showcase of everything that Alex G has proved he can do, now wrapped in an RCA-shaped box, while still an honest reflection of an artist stuck between the poles of security and desire, reaching out for connection as he reaches in for inspiration. “Some things I do for love,” Alex G sings to open “Beam Me Up, “Some things I do for money.” Headlights is as much of an opus as it is, only because it is so clearly, honestly both of these things—because Alex G proves on a major label the seriousness with which he takes his career as a musician, all the while strumming along a love letter to the singular sound he’s so conscientously
developed.

Pre-order Highlights by Aleg G HERE