A Conversation About Alex G’s ‘Headlights,’ One Of The Year’s Best Albums

This week, Alex G releases one of the most anticipated indie albums of the year, Headlights. It’s his 10th record and the first for major label RCA, but it might be the best entry point yet for one of the most consistent catalogs in contemporary rock. After two recent albums, 2019’s House Of Sugar and 2022’s God Save The Animals, that stand as his most experimental and strangest efforts, the 32-year-old singer songwriter has refocused on the Elliott Smith-style, indie-folk sound of his earlier records.

The result is one of the year’s best albums. But I was curious to hear the thoughts of Eli Enis, a sharp critic and Alex G super-fan who writes the essential Chasing Sundays newsletter. So I reached out and we had the following Alex G summit.

Steven: I wanted to talk to you about Headlights because we come at Alex G from different generational angles. I heard him for the first time a decade ago when I was in my mid-30s. And my first impression was that he was a good songwriter who probably wasn’t going to be as popular as some of the other artists coming out of the Bandcamp world, like Car Seat Headrest or Jay Som. And I was obviously wrong about that. But I must admit that I’m a little surprised by how foundational he became for indie fans of your generation.

Eli: Car Seat Headrest had a couple of great records. But he has a classicist throughline in his music. He didn’t really add anything contemporary to the decade that he emerged from. He was looking back to ’70s rock, mostly.

There were plenty of other artists who were messing around with GarageBand and making interesting cocktails of bedroom pop and lo-fi pop, but no one was able to elevate the way that Alex was. The way he’s grown with the way music has grown — in some ways leading it, but in other ways following the trajectory of how music has sounded over the last 10 years — is so important. I mean, he was featured on Frank Ocean’s Blonde, and he was already making music that sounded like that. It sounded natural for him to be on that record.

Steven: I thought it was interesting in his Pitchfork interview that Alex talked about recently getting into R.E.M, because this record reminds me of the albums R.E.M put out in the early ’90s after they went from being an indie band to being a major-label act. It’s reminiscent musically, particularly songs like “Afterlife” and “June Guitar” that have mandolins and accordions.

Eli: “Afterlife” was a really, really strong single. I think that was an instant classic. It felt like an anthem immediately.

Steven: It’s my favorite song of 2025 so far! Getting back to R.E.M.: They were able to thread this needle of having indie integrity while also making the most pop-friendly and mainstream music of their career on albums like Out Of Time and Automatic For The People. This Alex G record has that vibe. It sounds like his straightest album, in terms of it feeling like relatively normal singer-songwriter music. But it doesn’t seem he’s making any of the obvious “sellout” concessions. It’s just a really likeable, accessible record.

Eli: My hunch is that he didn’t think about it in those terms. He was saying in that interview that he feels more pressure to deliver a higher quality product these days, to do more takes during a recording than he used to. But he just strikes me as an artist who would never think about compromising or pandering to any particular audience.

It’s definitely one of his less experimental albums, especially after a run of records that had some pretty bizarre detours. But it also doesn’t feel like it’s vying to be super current. It sounds very contemporary because everything sounds like Alex G now. But I’m happy that it doesn’t sound like a major-label album. It sounds like an Alex G album that happens to be released on a major label, to whatever extent that even matters in the post-sellout age we’re living in.

Steven: It’s interesting to me that his most popular music on streaming platforms is from early in his career, particularly his 2012 album Trick. That’s also the music most indebted to ’90s and aughts era indie rock, like Elliott Smith and Built To Spill. In a way, this album feels like a return to that. The last track, “Logan Hotel,” sounds like Wilco.

Eli: I don’t mean this negatively, but he’s not introducing anything all that new on Headlights. He has a couple different weird voices. But there’s not the integration of hyperpop and SoundCloud rap elements that he was bringing in the last album. For a long time now, he’s pulled country and folk into his music. It just feels like part of his thing at this point. I can’t imagine an Alex G fan being disappointed by this record because nothing feels lackluster, but it also doesn’t feel entirely revolutionary.

Steven: “Beam Me Up” is an example of him taking a “classic” Alex G type song — Elliott Smith guitars, oddball vocal affects, beautiful chorus — and scaling up with a big-label budget.

Eli: That was an instant classic to me. “Louisiana,” too. That’s probably the loudest song on the record. I would say, overall, this is his quietest record in a long time.

Steven: “Beam Me Up” has self-referential lyrics, where he sings, “Some things I do for love / Some things I do for money, it ain’t like I don’t want it / It ain’t like I’m above it.” And that, again, feels like something a ’90s band would do after entering the major-label world. “Signing with a major label” is an underlying theme of his major-label debut.

Eli: I just think it speaks to music being his life. His career is his life, as he’s said in every interview. He doesn’t really have hobbies. He doesn’t really do that much else.

Steven: “Far And Wide” stands out as one of the weirder songs. He’s trying on this voice that sounds like Rufus Wainwright or Kermit The Frog.

Eli: I don’t know why I thought of the song “After Hours” by the Velvet Underground, where Moe Tucker sings with that really hammy voice.

Steven: Ha! Yes, totally.

Eli: We’re living in his “post-era” era of music, where anything from the last 70 to 80 years is up for grabs, and he plays with sounds from all corners of rock music history. That’s what really distinguishes him from all of his impersonators, many of whom I like, but they zero in on one element of Alex G’s sound. They do the folky stuff or they do the slowcore stuff, but no one really can do it all the way that he does.

Steven: Though, again, I feel like Headlights is him mostly focusing on his “singer-songwriter” side. I’m reminded of the performance of “Miracles” he did on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert a few years ago. If you watched that and knew nothing else about Alex G, you would assume he was just another sensitive guy with a guitar who sings songs about fatherhood. I’m sure that’s the sort of thing that convinced RCA to take a flier on this guy.

Eli: He’s definitely become more vulnerable with his lyrics. On this record and the last one, he’s talking a bit more explicitly about his relationship to the music industry and is revealing more about his personal life, whereas he wasn’t overt about that at all for many, many years.

Steven: That touches on a subject I wrote about recently, which is Alex G’s — deliberate or not — lack of a personality. Every profile written about him in some acknowledges that he’s hard to interview. I noted that on the last album cycle, there were two big profiles that opened with anecdotes about Alex drinking a Dunkin Donuts iced coffee. It’s almost comically banal! Again, I don’t know if this is by design or if he’s actually a boring guy. But he does strike me as unique as an indie star in his 30s whose appeal is not at all connected to a cult of personality. Mitski or Phoebe Bridgers write great songs, but their fan bases are also attracted to them as personas. Alex G, however, has no persona. Or, if he has one, it’s extremely bland.

Eli: I think it really is just the music. And he has always told stories in his songs. But I don’t think people necessarily read into the narratives because they’re always quite oblique and listeners don’t see their own lives projected back at them. I think that’s what makes him special — people like the way he plays music, and it’s just as simple as that. Because he has no social media presence. I don’t think he’s posted on his own accounts for a decade. And he’s seemingly uninterested or incapable of banter on stage. He doesn’t say anything really live. I’ve never seen him say more than an awkward joke, and people still eat it up. Part of what makes him intriguing to me is that he has this very online fan base, but he’s the most offline indie rock artist of our time.

Steven: There’s a larger conversation here about what indie stardom even means in 2025. But I wonder: Is Alex G actually a star? He’s clearly a popular musician. But there’s a difference between popular and famous. A lot of artists are popular without actually being stars, especially now. Even on a major label, Alex G still strikes me as a very successful cult act. Whereas Mitski, along with being successful, has obvious star quality in a classic, old-world sense.

It’s also possible that I’m thinking about this in an old-fashioned way.

Eli: I think he is the quintessential indie artist of our time, as quintessential to indie rock today as Sonic Youth was to indie rock in the ’80s and ’90s. And I don’t use that comparison lightly because, obviously, Sonic Youth is such a crucial band. But what Alex represents to modern indie music, the way he carries himself, the way he projects his music or lack thereof, the way he’s validated home recording, the way he’s influenced the way so much music is made, it’s all been very influential. The number of influences he pulls from and the way that has dictated so many of the trends we’ve seen, especially the alt-country thread, so much of that goes back to Alex G’s 2017 album Rocket. In terms of the urban bands, it validated a lot of artists who wanted to play that music.

Steven: I like the Sonic Youth comparison. But I’m going to circle back to R.E.M. Like Alex G, they put out several records before they were signed by a major label. And they were doing really well in the independent world. I would also say that R.E.M. had a fairly “normie” persona, where their brand wasn’t based so much on outrageousness as it was on consistently putting out well-crafted songs that people loved. Alex G has been similarly reliable for a long time now.

Headlights is out 7/18 via RCA Records. Find more information here.