Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Read more
In the early 2010s, it seemed as if everyone in indie rock wanted to be Mac DeMarco. The Canadian was the ultimate slacker success story, traversing the globe playing sold-out shows with a guitar in one hand, a half-drunk whiskey bottle in the other and a cigarette dangling from his lips. These days, at 35, DeMarco is already encountering a new generation that just doesn’t see the appeal. “It’s frustrating for me when I meet these young musicians who are like: ‘Oh, touring is so hard and exhausting,’” he says. His tone, at first incredulous, turns lightly mocking. “Maybe there are just too many nepo babies now that are used to sunning themselves in the south of France every summer going: ‘Oh Papa, this venue is so dark and stinky. I’d rather be on the shores of Marseille…’”
Much has changed for DeMarco since those debauched days in 2012 when he first sauntered onto the scene with his sleazy and subversive mini-album Rock and Roll Night Club and its laidback, hook-filled follow-up 2. Todayhehas a bigger fanbase than ever, with over 20 million Spotify listeners each month, but he’s left his hard-partying lifestyle behind. In conversation, he nowcuts an altogether more contemplative figure – without the slightly frayed, nicotinic air of old. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is his zeal for life on the road. “I tell those young musicians: ‘Don’t you see? This is why!’” he says, his voice rising with the verve of a religious proselytiser. “You get to go on vacation with your friends indefinitely, hang out with new people every night and you’re getting paid to do it! It’s the ultimate adventure!”
Today he’s talking to me down the line from a farmhouse on British Columbia’s Gulf Islands, where he’s decamped with his girlfriend Kiera McNally to grease the wheels for his own next world tour. He recently helped his mother Agnes move to a new home in Victoria, and bought his own tumbledown place a couple of hours away to enjoy the tranquillity of what he calls “a summer cabin kind of vibe”. Soon, his bandmates will join him to start rehearsals. There’s also a new album, Guitar, which he recorded alone at his home studio in Los Angeles in a fortnight and was initially just a pretence to get back touring. “I just wanted to go out and perform,” he says. “We could do that without releasing something, but I think that would make me feel like it was a reunion or greatest hits tour.”
Guitar may have been written with live shows in mind, but there’s nothing on it that remotely resembles a stadium rock anthem. Instead, DeMarco offers up a dozen spare, languid songs recorded with just guitar and drums, intimate paeans to the challenges of sobriety and the transformative magic of live music. “This album itself doesn’t sound very rock’n’roll,” he chuckles. “But it is, in essence. At this point, I just want to make something that feels right to me. I’m not trying to make some kind of smash. I’m deep enough in my career where I feel like I can make this kind of middle-aged, weird album.”
Songs such as “Rock and Roll” and “Holy” are gentle, grooving meditations on music’s electrifying power, while on dark lullaby “Terror”, DeMarco casts himself as a kind of disembodied spirit of rock stalking the Earth. “Honestly, that song is sort of autobiographical about those old days,” he explains. “I want to be that wandering terror of rock’n’roll again, in a sense. I guess ‘terror’ sounds a bit derogatory, but I think in this instance maybe it’s positive too. Rock’n’roll is inherently [about] terrorising, but also it f***ing rocks.”
Even over the phone, it’s easy to picture DeMarco’s boisterous, gap-toothed grin as he says this. In the 13 years since I first met and interviewed him, I can’t recall ever seeing him dressed in anything more formal than an old T-shirt and a crumpled dad cap. In 2014, when he was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize, Canada’s equivalent of the Mercury Prize, he performed in dungarees. He’s dishevelled on a constitutional level – but that’s always been part of his appeal.
open image in gallery
Mac DeMarco: ‘The music industry always wants you to play the bigger rock box, but the bigger rock box, I found, sucks’ (Mac DeMarco)
DeMarco was born in Duncan, British Columbia and raised by his mother in Edmonton, Alberta; after finishing high school he moved first to Vancouver and then to Montreal, where he found himself in the city’s warehouse music scene, gaining attention with his jangly garage rock and the DIY surrealism of his homemade music videos. I was there for some of DeMarco’s early shows in Canada and his London debut, and remember well the febrile, anything-could-happen energy that would crackle through the room whenever he took the stage. These days, he’s more confident that his songs can stand on their own.
“We could rock back in the day, but if s*** started going sideways then I’d be like: ‘Well, if I jump in the crowd, nobody’s gonna remember the bad songs. They’re just gonna remember me jumping in the crowd.’ It worked like a charm!” he remembers. “We wouldn’t have been able to do a quiet show that was still impactful back then. I don’t even know if I could sing like that. It just wouldn’t have worked.”
DeMarco mania arguably peaked around 2014’s Salad Days, a woozy, psychedelic album of low-stress bops, anchored by DeMarco’s mesmerically off-key guitar tuning. It was a time when his cult allure was so powerful he often found himself playing to rooms full of people dressed just like him.That record’s dreamy, synth-like “Chamber of Reflection” remains a mainstay on TikTok, and has been streamed almost a billion times. Even as his popularity swelled, DeMarco belied his slacker image by producing new work, entirely self-written and self-produced, at a reliable clip. 2015’s keys-led Another One was followed by the more experimental This Old Dog in2017 and the McCartney-esque Here Comes The Cowboy in2019.
I was trying to re-record everything, moving drum microphones around and building weird huts in my garage to change the sound… It got to the point where I was like, ‘This is ridiculous’
Mac DeMarco
His routine was upended, just like everyone else’s, when the pandemic hit. He took the opportunity to start freeing himself from the vices he felt held too much power over him, giving up alcohol during lockdown and finally kicking his most famous dirty habit while in the midst of the cross-country road trip that produced his 2023 instrumental album Five Easy Hot Dogs. “Thatwas when I ended up quitting smoking,” he recalls. “I drove across the country and lost my mind completely. It was f***ing horrible! Two weeks of just absolute pain.” The lack of lyrics on Five Easy Hot Dogs made it a departure for DeMarco, but the album successfully highlighted his playful musicianship. Encouraged by the reception, DeMarco cleared his decks by releasing 199 songs and demos as the sprawling compilation One Wayne G in 2023.
He started afresh last year, giving himself a couple of months back at home in Los Angeles to write and record a new album. His first attempt ended in a false start: an album tentatively titled Hear The Music thathe abandoned after contracting a serious case of “demo-itis” – that painful paranoia that no amount of tinkering will ever make the finished product measure up to the original idea. “I got into the state where I was trying to re-record everything, moving drum microphones around and building weird huts in my garage to change the sound,” he remembers. “It got to the point where I was like, this is ridiculous. So I shelved that, and then luckily I was able to make Guitar in a couple of weeks. They’re all demo recordings, so demo-itis was impossible. It just felt right.”
The songs on Guitar,mostly sequenced in the same order he wrote them in, arrive purposelyunpolished. In an age when it’s possible to carry a production desk inside your phone and the charts are filled with carefully calibrated, committee-approved pop music, it’s hard not to hear the songs’ fragile, imperfect beauty as a statement against bland conformity. The arrival of AI, points out DeMarco, only amplifies the creeping sense that everything is starting to sound the same. “We’re in a funny zone right now where AI is coming in and getting good at things, fast,” he says. “Things start feeling paint-by-numbers sometimes. When you have AI bands coming around, and people listening to music without even realising it’s AI-generated, we’re in a weird place.”
open image in gallery
Mac DeMarco: ‘I’m deep enough in my career where I feel like I can make this kind of middle-aged, weird album’ (Mac DeMarco)
As disdainful as DeMarco was about the idea of young musicians not wanting to go out on tour, he’s even more horrified by the idea that they may not even want to write their own songs. “I hear about people using AI to even write lyrics a lot nowadays, which is a bit like… give me a f***ing break,” he sighs. “I think it’s about intention. If people want to climb the mountain, I guess you use the tools you can to get up there. I don’t know what you’re gonna find when you get up there, but hopefully you’re happy.”
DeMarco prefers to ascend the mountain at his own pace. He feels similarly about touring. When he sets off later this month for his latest trek around the US, Europe, Canada and Japan, he and his band will be squeezed into a modest sprinter van they’ll drive themselves. He has an aversion to tour buses and would rather play a handful of nights in a medium-sized venue than headline an arena. “The music industry always wants you to play the bigger rock box, but the bigger rock box, I found, sucks,” he says. “I’m not about to get a video wall and s***. No disrespect to the video wall. Big bands that do a crazy light show, that’s f***ing amazing. It’s just not me.”
Needless to say, you’ll never hear an AI-augmented melody or a robot-scripted lyric on a Mac DeMarco record. “There’s a satisfaction I have with this kind of thing, because of how pure and real it feels to me,” he says of Guitar. “It’s supremely of me. The most important part of art is the human element, I think. Be it good or bad, that’s what I want to hear.”
‘Guitar’ is released on 22 August. DeMarco’s tour begins in the US on 29 August and arrives in the UK on 8 November