For 15 years now, Alex G has been perhaps the ultimate cult artist. Starting out as simply as you can get – a 17-year-old music-obsessed kid in Philadelphia – he realised he didn’t have to waste time playing in scrappy local bands. He could do everything himself. So he did. Time after time after time, making charming, DIY, scratchy lo-fi indie-rock with weird electronic undertones and releasing it all on Bandcamp. It was to increasing underground and, eventually, overground acclaim – including catching the eye of Frank Ocean, another singularly mysterious musical auteur who brought Alex into the pop space with his work on Frank’s albums ‘Endless’ and ‘Blonde’, as well as joining him on tour in 2017.

Despite all this success, though, no one really knows quite who Alex G is. Perhaps the now 32-year-old songwriter can’t even answer that question himself. But his stunning tenth album, ‘Headlights’, is his most lucid expression yet of the world of Alex G.

“It definitely started for me as a way to figure out who I was,” says Alex, as he relaxes at home on a little bit of downtime before the album comes out. “I don’t want to be overly romantic about it because I also wanted to play shows and do the fun stuff, but there’s always been that exploratory aspect.” Exploring has been a constant theme throughout Alex’s winding career. He’s someone who thinks deeply about what he’s doing and his passion for making music. In many ways, his musical career hasn’t really changed since he was messing about as a teenager writing songs.

“Man, I wish I had more hobbies,” he laughs. Often at Dork, we encounter people who love cooking or gardening or chess, or the odd insane person who loves pickleball. For Alex, though, it’s all about the music. It defines him and everything he does. He does have one book recommendation, though. “I got this book I’ve been working through – it’s a really old book called Don Quixote,” he says. We’ve checked, and he’s right: this book is very old. It was published way back in 1605 by Miguel de Cervantes. “I like getting books that look interesting and old, but I wouldn’t call it a hobby because it’s not something I’m keeping up with very actively. It’s just once in a while,” he adds. There’s just too much music to make.

‘Headlights’ is Alex’s first album for a major label, RCA Records, and it follows on from 2022’s ‘God Save the Animals’ in being recorded in actual recording studios with a team of a producer and an engineer, rather than just Alex on his own as he has done for so many years. It’s brighter, bolder and more dynamic than any of his previous releases, with broader instrumentation and a yearning, blissful purity that makes it feel like a new beginning. It feels like a good moment for Alex G to return, with a number of alt-rock artists who have been around for years – like Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman – reaching career peaks and finding new, obsessed young audiences.

You could see it at Alex’s performance earlier this summer at Outbreak Festival in London, where thousands of people who were barely born when he released his first music on Bandcamp were in raptures. It feels like there’s something in the ether; people need new Alex G music right now, and this will likely be his most successful album. With typical understatement, the man himself is fairly ambivalent.

“I can’t tell,” he says. “I truly don’t even know what to expect, or what that would mean, or even if people are going to like the record. I stay away from the internet these days. I don’t want to see anything – there’s always something surprising, where you didn’t want to see that. I hope it goes well. It’s been 15 years, so I do my best not to think about it. I think about making the records a lot, and that takes over my life, but once that’s done, I don’t listen to it anymore and tend not to think about it.”

The album is a clear progression for Alex musically, with a richer and bigger sound, but it’s hard for the artist at the heart of it to track that development. There’s a sense for Alex that some things might change – the rooms he plays in are bigger, there are more and more fans – but equally, everything else stays exactly the same. “I don’t know if it’s linear. I don’t know if it’s been a steady development in a positive direction,” he says, as he looks back on the last decade and a half.

There are elements on ‘Headlights’ where he is searching to try and recapture something of his youth. “I was just thinking the other day that I picked up the guitar and played this chord that I used to put into every song when I was a teenager,” he explains. “It made me remember when I was first writing songs, how I would write the whole song based on a new chord I found. I didn’t really know how to play the instrument that well. There was something unique about that that I’m recently trying to revisit – this feeling from just one chord. As I got older as a songwriter, I kind of lost that as I was thinking so much about the progression.”

There’s this thing that Alex frequently does that makes him such a fascinating (and sometimes maddening) character. He’ll give a long and considered answer, just like that one, punctuated by frequent pauses as he ponders the question, before ultimately skewering the whole thing by laughing and saying, “That’s a long-winded way of saying I don’t know.” You get the feeling, though, that, deep down, he does know. He knows exactly what he means, but he wants the listener to have to work hard to figure that out – to explore themselves and come up with their own interpretation of his songs and his work. If you’re an Alex G fan, you’re all in on that journey to try to pierce that inscrutable veil.

With someone so prolific, there’s a tendency to think that songwriting is effortless – that this magic just comes from nowhere. That he can release an album every year with minimal effort.

“It’s inherently not easy, as anything easy wouldn’t evoke the emotional response from myself,” says Alex. “That’s the only way I know. That’s why it’s my hobby, too – I get a real excitement from it, and if I’m not getting that excitement, that’s the hard part. That’s when I keep searching. That searching is the work aspect. A lot of time is spent just throwing things at the wall until I feel something. There’s no map for how to get there.”

‘Headlights’ was perhaps the hardest record to make of his career as he navigated a different creative process and the increased resources at his disposal. The added knowledge of being more familiar and comfortable in the studio from his last album offered up its own challenges this time around.

“My previous record, ‘God Save the Animals’, I was throwing myself into the studio work style and navigating that. Then, with this record, I was familiar with it and taking advantage of the fact I had an engineer,” he explains. “With an engineer, I could sit there and do take after take and not think of mic placement or, I dunno, just hitting stop and play, and not think of when you’re chopping up files. That spontaneous thing came about organically because it was something new that I hadn’t taken advantage of on previous records. When doing it myself, it was just way more effort if I didn’t have a plan to go in and start fucking around.”

Having a plan and being more proscriptive was initially difficult. “It led me down paths I wasn’t interested in way more than previous records,” he admits. “This time around, I dug myself into a hole with a certain sound on multiple songs where I would go in this direction and hit a wall and think, oh, I’m just going to have to toss this whole song. Because without having gone into it in a not-calculated way, I’ve made something bad. I’ve made something shitty. That is one of the side effects that this had.”

Ultimately, despite the revisions and the retakes, Alex and his band, along with producer Jacob Portrait, crafted something that became a new way forward for the Alex G sound. The brightness entered the studio like sunlight spilling through your bedroom window at dawn, encapsulated in the ringing melodic beauty of the lead single, ‘Afterlife’.

The mandolin-led ‘Afterlife’ feels optimistic and open-hearted as he sings, “When the light came big and bright I began another life.” For Alex, the reality is more muddled. “’Afterlife’ didn’t necessarily feel optimistic to me, but not pessimistic either,” he ponders. “Sometimes I’ll write songs when I can’t sleep, and this is one of those songs. I wrote that melody and the chord progression really fast. At that time, it didn’t have an optimistic feeling. The lyrics feel like a surreal reflection on a life, and ‘afterlife’ is either the character’s hope for an afterlife or they’re in an afterlife. I wasn’t quite sure. It’s all just free associating.”

Alex G discourse online is full of deep analysis of his songs and his lyrics, the stories he tells, and the characters he inhabits. Are they even characters at all? On ‘Afterlife’, there’s a sense of eternally living forever and being frozen in a specific time. The lyrics reference forms of technology like the radio, the television, the telephone – things that once felt futuristic but now seem oddly quaint in this hyper-speed, overstimulated social age. It feels like a nostalgic song, in essence.

It’s a theory that makes Alex stop and think in that endearingly naïve way before he posits his own feelings in his quietly considered voice. “I don’t want to say too much, as I don’t want to destroy whatever impression people might have, but I was thinking with those lines more of this feeling I have when I’m talking on the phone or watching TV – of not being sure if it’s all me or it’s all in my head. Even talking to you. Am I seeing a reflection or seeing something different?”

Does he actually believe in an afterlife, though? “I really don’t know,” he laughs. “I was just exploring. I really don’t know what I believe as far as that goes. It’s something I see as a blind spot.”

While ‘Afterlife’ is the life-affirming centrepiece of the album, one of the other highlights provides a darker-hued contrast. ‘Louisiana’ is a cut-up and filtered sound collage, disorienting and confusing – a song that Alex holds dear. “It’s one of my favourites from the record,” he smiles. “It feels relevant to me in setting the tone. That song had a colder, greyer feeling, and was a nice context for the rest of the songs.”

One of the best things about Alex G’s music is how he can perfectly evoke a specific place, time or memory – which he does beautifully on the tender lament of ‘Oranges’. “Oranges, they fall from the trees in the Florida Keys,” he sings plaintively. As ever, though, the real feeling is more gauzy and less specific. “I have been to Florida a few times. One time, we were down there on tour, and they had an orange tree, and it was cool – not to say that it’s definitely about that experience,” says Alex. “It’s not important to me, the real place. I’ve never thought about why. The real place isn’t important, but the place has a zeitgeisty feeling attached to it. That’s what I’m chasing. I don’t have a real attachment to that place – it’s the feeling that the thought of that place gave me.”

There are lots of callbacks and connective tissue for fans to trawl through on ‘Headlights’, whether it’s songs that capture the sonic essence of previous work through a more focused, produced sheen or lyrical echoes like “I’m gonna put that rocket way up in the sky” from the song ‘Beam Me Up’, referencing Alex’s beloved 2017 album ‘Rocket’. The characters he describes here feel familiar, not because they are returning per se, but because they are functions of Alex looking within himself – the same foibles, doubts, dreams and desires that have always driven him.

“They are all just me,” he states. “They always feel like logical extensions of myself. It never feels like I’m bringing back an old character, as it always feels like the natural response to what I’m trying to make at that moment. I’m sure there are characters that re-emerge because I do harp on about the same things sometimes. I guess it comes because I’m trying not to think too hard about it, in the hope that something cool happens when I’m not thinking about it. But sometimes I end up repeating myself.”

As the album progresses, through the celebratory joy of the title-track, a central theme begins to emerge. “Driving is something I really enjoy doing. We’ve been touring on a bus for the last couple of tours, and something I miss is just driving ourselves down the highway,” says Alex. It’s a theme of reflection, motion and clarity – one that peaks with the gentle ballad ‘Far and Wide’ and its striking lyric: “I’ve searched far and wide for a place like this, through so many storms in this shipwrecked world.”

That sense of acceptance permeates the album’s closing track, the rousing, anthemic ‘Logan Hotel (Live)’. Does the album end on a hopeful note, or one of quiet resignation?

“I guess resignation, although I wish there was a better word for it,” answers Alex. “I completely understand, as the lyric is ‘No matter what you choose now, you’re going to have to lose now.’ It’s resignation, but life, in my experience, feels like losing a lot. But you just get used to it. There is no winning. You’re just here.” Sometimes, just being here is enough. It’s not cool, but sometimes, it’s all you can do.

Actually, maybe it is cool. The notion of cool – and what it means – is something that fascinates Alex. ‘Headlights’ features sounds, styles and instrumentation that might be considered not cool: old-fashioned instruments like mandolins or the accordion that Alex plays lovingly in the video to ‘June Guitar’. His perception of what’s cool – or cringe – has helped shape his uniquely idiosyncratic sound.

“I do have a sense of what makes me cringe,” he laughs. “Over time that becomes the thing that I’m fascinated with. There’s something about it – if I’m cringing at it, I can’t understand the motivation. There’s something that fascinates me with the not-cool thing. It is a feeling. I know that if I don’t want to do it, then eventually I will really want to do it.”