Alex G Tickets

'Headlights' the latest record from Alex Giannascoli, better known as Alex G, the singer-songwriter whose surreal storytelling has been converting casual listeners into obsessives for more than a decade and a half. On these twelve new songs, Alex G revisits the reality-bending terrain that has made him both a beloved artist and an unassuming cultural figure, a cross-generation talent whose specific point of view attracts collaborators ranging from pop superstars to visionary filmmakers.

'Headlights' also finds Alex enlarging that purview, stretching and distorting the scenery with sonic experiments, glimmers of unsullied sentimentality, and clear-sighted poetry that demonstrates how even weirdo wisdom deepens with experience (“Love ain’t for the young, anyhow / Something that you learn from falling down,” he sings on opener “June Guitar”). Streamlining a workflow that began with 2022’s 'God Save the Animals', Alex mostly forwent home recording for sessions in studios around the lower Northeast, reteaming with longtime collaborator Jacob Portrait for mixing and production. The result is his tenth full-length album, a meaningful milepost on the winding and remarkable path that Alex has been forging since he was a teenager.

Like the songwriting giants Alex is sometimes cited as being in conversation with—Neil Young, Elliott Smith, Lucinda Williams—Alex’s take on Americana is at turns direct and impressionistic, suffused with mystery and melancholy. That heritage is audible all over 'Headlights', a gorgeous collection of metaphysical road music in which literal travel and the passage of time are interchangeable phenomena, where dying is no different than driving fast down a freeway on a night with no stars. The album’s characters are familiar archetypes from Alex’s arsenal: lovers and loners and dreamers, here taking stock of their legacies at intersections both geographic and metaphorical. They pick fruit in Florida (“Oranges”) and succumb to flashbacks on the Gulf Coast (“Louisiana”). They engage Death in a car chase (“Headlights”) and yearn to live forever “in between / heaven and the TV screen.” (“Afterlife’).

Moments on 'Headlights' will surely conjure music from Alex’s sprawling back catalog. Whether it’s the recurrence of familiar sonic language (like the pan flute synth melody on “Real Thing”) or other imagery that seems to reference his discography (like “I’m gonna put that rocket way up in the sky” on “Beam Me Up”), these evocations are markers honoring Alex’s rare gift for building worlds and articulating moods. Maybe more than any record before it, Headlights demonstrates how Alex’s lexicon of symbols and sounds has, over years and albums, grown into something bigger: a musical mythology that is affecting and unmistakable. It doesn’t feel hyperbolic to recognize that his creative eccentricity has helped steer the trajectory of post-2010s indie and alternative; it’s not uncommon to hear new music and think, that sounds a little bit like Alex G. But Headlights is a good reminder that the best way to understand his impact is by listening to the songs.

Headlights is a nighttime car trip through an American life, its absurd twists and mundane milestones narrated by one of the twenty-first century’s most celebrated and influential rock & roll architects. Every traffic sign is a melody, every streetlamp is a story, and the roadside is dotted with shadowy monuments made from half-remembered dreams. Alex G isn’t the car’s driver or even a passenger: he’s the voice on the radio keeping us company as we navigate landscape and memory and the beautiful, ephemeral dark.