Over the last few years, Alex Giannascoli’s life was unfolding in a way that made it seem like he might record a very capital-M Mature new album. The pandemic grounded the 29-year-old musician, who performs under the name of Alex G, in one place for the longest time in years. He got back into running and bought a house in Philadelphia. He read a lot and found himself thinking about religion. And, perhaps most significantly, he put aside his reputation as a self-taught home-production genius and started recording in a professional studio for the very first time.
So it’s telling that the record that resulted, God Save the Animals, leans into this mood of introspection and growth, and still amounts to his most thrilling and playful record yet. One July morning in the atrium at the Brooklyn Ace Hotel, Giannascoli ruminated on how his ninth album, out this week, became such a romp. “I’m always trying to keep myself entertained while making music,” he said. “Because that’s just my only gauge of the quality of it.”
Affably laconic, with a slight build, wearing putty-colored clothes, and drinking a boxed water, Giannascoli told me he often struggles to describe his creative process. “I do have a process that I go through writing and trying to think of this stuff. But it’s something that happens subconsciously for the most part,” he said. “And then I try to put it into words, and I end up…. I’m almost lying when I try.”
Whatever the truth is, it has worked. Over the last decade, his prolific output of uncannily catchy songs has made him a cult hero, with boosters in Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner and Frank Ocean, who invited Giannascoli to play on his 2016 album Blonde. His fanbase, which skews young, has given him a minor TikTok hit, and the die-hards congregate on an highly active Reddit page—12,000 members strong—where they dissect lyrics and share playlists. (They were seemingly the original source of a photo showing a shaggy Giannascoli covered in spilled beer that went viral back in 2019 after conservatives mistook it for a photo of Beto O’Rourke.) In July, he made his late-night debut on The Tonight Show, and when he returns to New York on his fall tour, it will be for two nights of sold-out shows at Brooklyn Steel.
In some ways, Giannascoli embodies the humor and subtlety of his music, but also acknowledges that the phenomenon exists somewhat outside of himself as a person. He mainly stays off social media, except to promote the music, and described his main pastimes as watching TV and cooking for his partner and musical collaborator, Molly Germer. The onset of the pandemic in 2020 postponed a much-anticipated world tour for his last album, but otherwise, he said that his life didn’t really change too much in quarantine. Eventually, though, he did start to want to spend some time outside of his house, so he made a routine of going to a local recording studio.
“If one day I was trying to write, and I couldn’t think of anything, I’d hit up my friend who worked in the studio and say, ‘Can I come in and just mess around?’” Giannascoli recalled. “And I was just messing around a lot, and one thing led to another, and I was like, Oh, I actually think I could do this.”
Eventually he brought in his collaborator Jake Portrait, a producer and member of the indie band Unknown Mortal Orchestra, to help turn his studio foray into a record. In an interview last month, Portrait explained that Giannascoli’s talent as a songwriter makes their work together much easier. “It’s so cool that he has such an imaginative idea of what records should sound like and also the ability to just write some sick songs and some really great lyrics,” Portrait said. “When the meat of the song is that good, you can do it a million different ways without doing a disservice to the song.”
By Chris Maggio.
He added that recording in the studio for God Save the Animals was an opportunity for them to expand on some of the things he already loved about working with Giannascoli. “Alex loves recordings, and he comes in with these references, like a song or some specific drum sound,” Portrait said. “Even when he was making records with a $99 microphone, he was always a listener.” The goal for this album was to make it a bit less isolated and more referential while also availing of the skills of studio engineers and musicians he knows.
Ultimately, it meant bringing in some of the youthful energy from the Alex G live performances. The rest of Giannascoli’s live band joined for some of the recording sessions, and the final song on the album, “Forgive,” is a live take from a trip to Clubhouse recording studio in Rhinebeck, New York.