Alex Giannascoli suspects that his car smells like piss. The 29-year old songwriter leans around from the driver seat of his silver sedan to examine the potential offender: Rocco, a mid-size, mottled black-and-brown mutt who sits calmly in the backseat, the portrait of innocence. It’s a humid July afternoon and Giannascoli, who performs under the name Alex G, has just arrived at Blackwood, New Jersey’s Timber Creek dog park, a massive wooded complex half an hour outside Philadelphia. Clutching a sweating Dunkin’ iced coffee in one hand, with his slightly silvering dark hair tucked under an Ohio University baseball cap, he unclips Rocco’s leash. The dog gallops towards a lake where, just as Giannascoli predicted, he searches for fish along the shore.
The tranquil scene is suddenly interrupted when Rocco wanders away from the water and into a stranger’s bag of food. With a mumbled “oh shit,” Giannascoli leaps up from a picnic table to pull Rocco away from Jake, an idiotically cute Goldendoodle. “He eats everything, he might not leave you alone,” the musician warns Jake’s owner with an awkward chuckle as Rocco starts sniffing around for treats. She waves him away with the nonchalance of the mom who knows she has all the best snacks, and Giannascoli returns to the table mildly defeated. “He’s going to eat all her food.”
Giannascoli and his girlfriend, Molly Germer, a classically trained violinist who tours with Japanese Breakfast, adopted Rocco in late 2019. Initially, there were logistical concerns about what to do with the pup when Giannascoli hit the road in support of his eighth record, the beguiling House of Sugar. When COVID put those plans on pause, he stayed in Philadelphia for the longest stretch of time since 2014. He had already started working on his latest album, God Save the Animals, in the same fashion he has since he was a teenager, writing and demoing all the parts at home. Following House of Sugar, Giannascoli became increasingly curious about working in a studio. The pandemic allowed him to dip his feet into this world with his own sense of spontaneity. “I wasn’t planning ahead very much,” he says. “I would just call different studios the day of and see which one was available.”
Out later this month, God Save the Animals is Alex G’s most refined album yet, proof that he can evolve beyond home-recording while still retaining a mesmerizing weirdness. The warm, ’90s alt-rock glow of “Runner” is splintered by a declaration—“I have done a couple bad things!”—followed by a guttural scream. Sometimes the surprises arrive as stylistic choices, like on “No Bitterness,” which ponders radical acceptance atop a mind-melting hyperpop breakdown. Other moments disarm through heartfelt explorations of spirituality. “Some of the lyrics refer back to faith or God,” he explains as we walk through the woods in search of a quiet place to chat. “It’s not a concept album, but those types of lyrics came up more than usual so I figured it couldn’t hurt.”
On the folksy stunner “Miracles,” a character clings to their faith in the face of uncertainties about parenthood and creative labor: “How many more songs am I supposed to write/Before I should turn it off and say goodnight?” It’s tempting to project this narrative onto Giannascoli’s own life, but he insists that all of his songs, including “Miracles,” are filled with “grotesque caricatures, a mess of what’s true and what’s not.”
Giannascoli’s hesitation to dissect his work has led fans to theorize that his songs are about everything from good-natured gamblers to a romantically-invested schoolyard bully to dogs. Especially dogs. It’s not that much of a stretch—canines appear on a number of songs and a few album covers—but he’s ready to put that rumor to rest. He adopts a shriek of mock indignation—“It’s not all about dogs!”—before coming to a halt in the middle of a massive field. Then, a groan: “I’m saying this as we’re walking my dog through a dog park.”
He doubles down on the insistence that he’s “not, like, an animal guy, not any more than your average person,” despite once singing “I do animals/Not people.” So what about the title, God Save the Animals? A line saved from a discarded song, “it made me feel something” is all he’ll say. Giannascoli is aware that his reticence can make him a challenging subject. “It’s always the same thing with me where I work pretty hard on the music and I don’t work very hard on my personality,” he concedes with a grin.
Alex G first released his songs on MySpace, hiding his “dorky 12-year-old” face behind avatars because, he dryly notes, “I wanted people to like the music.” As a teenager in the mid-2000s, he turned his attention to solo home recordings that he distributed via email, MediaFire, and burned CDs. (Indie rock archeologists have painstakingly dug up these scraps, which Giannascoli considers “flattering” while reiterating that he has grown a lot as an artist.) By the early 2010s, he had uploaded his already prolific catalog to Bandcamp and adopted an abbreviated version of his name after seeing that strangers were using it when sharing his music online.
Though he’s refined his songwriting trademarks over time, nearly all of them are evident in these early songs: his seemingly instinctual gift for writing beautiful melodies, as well as the competing desire to scribble all over them until they are kinda deranged; a fondness for characters that are at once naive and wicked, benevolent and self-centered; and a boyish drawl frequently warped to uncanny extremes, as inspired by the Swedish electronic duo the Knife. “When I discovered that [vocal modulation] effect on GarageBand,” he says, “I was like, fuck yeah, I’m gonna do this on all my shit.”
Giannascoli’s cult following was of his own creation. After the release of his adored 2014 album, DSU, he signed with the prominent indie label Domino, ebbing his constant stream of releases to a steady drip. Frank Ocean came calling, and Giannascoli contributed guitar parts to 2016’s Blonde and Endless, followed by a handful of live dates that were documented by director Spike Jonze. If anything shifted for Alex G after Blonde, he says, it was that “maybe more people gave me the benefit of the doubt.”
In the years since, Giannascoli has been reliably unpredictable, like when he performed as (Sandy) Alex G for three years without much explanation. He tried out country twang on 2017’s Rocket, indulged in experimental soundscapes on House of Sugar, and continued his streak of unsettling work with the We’re All Going to the World’s Fair score. His predisposition to keep his head down, stay off social media, and occasionally cover Coldplay has made it all the more hilarious when an odd bit of ephemera floats to the surface. There was the time in 2019 when conservatives mistook a photo of him with beer spilled all over his crotch for Texas politician Beto O’Rourke. More recently, a clip of him hypnotically shaking his rump to the demonic God Save the Animals cut “Blessing” went viral. Giannascoli, for his part, didn’t understand why the dancing video got so much attention: “I feel like I’m always doing random shit.”
Alex G: I’m less insecure about it, but I’m definitely more of a perfectionist now. On previous albums, I didn’t care as much, or I guess I felt like if the ideas were there and I was getting them across, they’ll live out there for whoever wants them. But for this album, I wanted to be on key. If I spend all this time on the lyrics and shit I might as well do it right.
As far as production, I’d imagine I have a lot in common with electronic or pop producers. I’m not trying to get something organic, I’m going in and chopping stuff up, manipulating things after the fact. I don’t care about the process. I just want the product to sound exactly how I want it. Working in a studio helped me become more aware of my vocal performance because the quality of the microphones was so much better—I could hear all the details that I was screwing up. My normal method has been to treat the vocals like any other instrument, but I realized that I could put them upfront in the mix and treat it like a pop song.
It’s more like I’m trying to capture a feeling more immediately. Take the Minions movie: You could have people dressed up like minions or you could animate the Minions. It’s a ridiculous example but they’re all over the internet so they come to mind. I’m trying to depict the thing physically as opposed to just saying the words and hoping the listener will come around to the image.
Moby was one of the first artists I fell in love with. My sister had Play on CD: I was obsessed, I would listen to it all day. Something about the way he organizes everything in these really rigid patterns was super gratifying for me, I could really understand and visualize the songs. I had a friend who had GarageBand and I remember dragging the loops around and realizing that I could do shit like that.
My sister’s CD collection was my source of music for a long time. When she showed me Kid A, I was really psyched about the electronic drums and creepy voices. Radiohead was my gateway into other bands, like Modest Mouse. From like 15 to 19, all I listened to was Elliott Smith. I started to appreciate the more human aspect of music and was attracted to the idea of writing my own lyrics. It became important to me to express myself verbally as opposed to just making stuff that sounded cool.
A few people that I’m close to became religious. It made me wonder what they found. I love exploring those concepts lyrically because I don’t have to have any answers. I can just paint an abstract picture and see what happens. I’m not great at talking about this stuff in a way that I would feel comfortable having a ton of people read. I didn’t know [what faith meant] at the beginning of this writing process and I still don’t really know.
Over the last couple of years, it dawned on me that you can forgive yourself. I don’t want to get into this whole corny-ass shit, but I realized how powerful that is.
Maybe when I was younger it was a matter of keeping my business private. But really it’s just gut. Sometimes I leave personal things in because it just feels right. I’m basically making a collage with every song and there’s no exact image I’m trying to replicate. My idea of why I did what I did changes every day. The true answer is, I don’t know.
Sometimes people ask if I’m being ironic or earnest, and it’s like, that’s not even the point. Part of my goal is to make the angle unclear, even to myself. I just want to make it strike a chord.
I go on there from time to time. Sometimes I see something, and I have to take a long break because sometimes stuff hits you in the wrong way. Beyond Reddit, I’ve seen people read into songs and assess them in a way that I haven’t even considered. Sometimes I’m writing from a knee-jerk place and I just put it down, because it feels right or poetic in those moments, but I don’t really know what I’m talking about. So when someone’s interpretation is really dead on, I am moved. It’s as if they knew what I was getting at better than I did. But 99 percent of the time it’s fucking wrong. [Laughs] I’ve made peace with that, I can’t take it for granted that people actually care. That’s still pretty nuts to me.
I probably sit down to write just about as much. Maybe it’s a little different now because I have more responsibilities and so I can’t get my head there as quickly as I used to. But it’s about the same. I’m writing all the time because it feels like what I’m supposed to do. Not in a noble way, it’s just what I know how to do and if I’m not doing something, I go crazy.
“Sandy” is a song written from a child’s perspective, which is funny in retrospect because I was probably 17 or 18, writing about a 14-year-old as if they were super young. When I wrote it back in 2011, I didn’t have much online as Alex G but had been making a ton of music and needed somewhere to put it all. I had considered doing a project where all of the songs were written from the perspective of this character, Sandy, so I made that my Bandcamp name. I never ended up writing another song like “Sandy” but when I had to change my name, I just used that. Looking back, it’s so goofy, Sandy in parentheses. I don’t want to put anyone on blast but putting Sandy on my name was not for any artistic purpose, it was purely functional, like, don’t sue me.
It’s definitely a conscious thing but there wasn’t one day where we decided to take it more seriously. Around the House of Sugar tour, we started practicing more and got on a more regular schedule. We’re getting older. I’m hitting a point where this is probably my best bet for getting money. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll be fine, I can do other stuff. I guess my thinking is that this is a pretty nice gig, so we should take it more seriously and try to get as much longevity out of it.
When I round the finish line of every record, I always feel like it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. That I lost whatever it was that enabled me to make everything that came before. Molly always reminds me that I do this every single time without fail, but it doesn’t help. I’m like, yeah, I know I did it before, but this time it’s real. I’ve mentally prepared myself for this one. People could hear it and be like, Oh he actually kind of sucks now, and I’ll be like, Yeah, I thought so too.
I’m grateful that I have this outlet because I’ve encountered that I’m not great at expressing myself in life otherwise. Every time I make music, I’m trying to poke this thing in my brain that makes me go, cool. Studying music, for example, is not going to make hitting that button any easier. Maybe it would make hitting other people’s buttons easier, but all I’m interested in is my button.
