MONDAY 11:41 AM JUNE 23, 2025 TIMES SQUARE
It was 100 degrees in New York when we asked Alex G to meet up to talk about his 10th studio album—and his first on a major label—Headlights. And what better place to interrogate the bashful and universally adored musician than smack dab in the middle of steamy Times Square? Wearing a faded cap and white V-neck, the Philadelphia-born artist drifts through the chaos of the M&M and LEGO stores with the pensive expression of someone who’s spent the last decade avoiding places like this. Maybe it’s the heat, or the new record, or the thrill of the human-sized LEGO vehicles. But today, Alex G is game. Headlights marks a growth spurt for the artist, born Alex Giannascoli. There’s a newfound clarity on the album, one that echoes in the strings and the record’s tight lyricism. But the process has stayed much the same. “The way I write is very impulsive, and if it’s not, then I truly can’t gauge whether it’s good or not,” he explains, “Because my gauge is whether it’s making me feel something in the moment.” Between Jimmy’s corner, the steps of Times Square, and the comfort of a LEGO yellow cab, the 32-year-old artist went deep on M&Ms, the naked Crypto guy, and how he perfects those strings.–EMILY SANDSTROM
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WALKING TO THE LEGO STORE
JULIAN RIBEIRO: When’s the last time you were in Times Square? Never, Right?
ALEX GIANNASCOLI: I’m sure I’ve been here before. Maybe when we were playing The [Late Show With Stephen] Colbert or CBS Morning or something.
RIBEIRO: That is Radio City Music Hall over here.
GIANNASCOLI: Oh, Radio City Music Hall. I don’t know what… Wait, that might’ve been Tribeca. Is that a neighborhood near here?
RIBEIRO: Tribeca is a little south.
GIANNASCOLI: I was at a friend’s apartment there and he was pointing out some building across the way that had no windows.
RIBEIRO: Oh. There’s also a prison there which looks like it doesn’t have windows. It’s actually in Chinatown. It’s this giant fucking stone building, and I think people have been trying to demolish it for years. It’s like, “Y’all know Diddy is like a hundred feet in the air from us?!”
SPEAKER 3: That crypto kidnap thing happened nearby there.
RIBEIRO: Oh my god. That happened near my office.
GIANNASCOLI: What?
RIBEIRO: Basically in the middle of the day, an apartment door opens and a naked man runs out screaming. He’s like, “HELP, HELP! Oh my God, I’m free!” Everyone is like, “What the fuck?” And they go in this place and they arrest this guy and it turns out this guy who knew this other dude kidnapped him and held him in this apartment trying to get his crypto information, and was torturing him and all this crazy shit.
GIANNASCOLI: Oh my God.
RIBEIRO: For a month. And they knew each other! Then one day he broke free, he just ran out in the street. And it’s like a super pedestrian-popular place where there’s lots of tourists and people going about their days. It was for his crypto, bro.
GIANNASCOLI: Holy shit. And the dude didn’t even give up his info?
RIBEIRO: No, no. He never got it.
GIANNASCOLI: Good for him.
RIBEIRO: I know.
GIANNASCOLI: So badass.
RIBEIRO: Well apparently they were making him fucking smoke crack, and being like, “TELL US THE TRUTH. GIVE US THE BITCOIN.”
GIANNASCOLI: [Laughs] Can you imagine seeing that naked guy emerge?
RIBEIRO: And you’re just there with your matcha and your like, German children, and you’re like, “I love New York City.” And then this happens.
RIBEIRO: Wait, should we go to M&M or Lego first?
GIANNASCOLI: You choose.
RIBEIRO: Let’s do the Lego store first.
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LEGO STORE
RIBEIRO: God, we are at the Lego store. A lot is happening.
GIANNASCOLI: Oh, man. I don’t know where to start.
RIBEIRO: I don’t know where to start either. Let’s start at the LEGO Empire State Building and we can go around.
GIANNASCOLI: Okay, cool. The taxi is amazing.
RIBEIRO: The LEGO taxi is really amazing. I’m really into the large-scale minifigure guys. Big Lego Spider-Man is pretty hard. Star Wars stuff is a classic for LEGO, I feel like.
GIANNASCOLI: This is awesome.
RIBEIRO: Wow. The LEGO One World Trade Center is beautiful.
GIANNASCOLI: Oh, that’s what that is.
RIBEIRO: It does imply the existence of a Lego Twin Towers at one point. Did you have a childhood affinity for LEGOs?
GIANNASCOLI: LEGO? Yeah. They were always in the house and I absolutely loved them. It’s what I did every day.
RIBEIRO: I’m realizing they’ve got more complicated as time has gone on. It’s like a power creep thing where they’re just going to keep getting crazier. The Frozen one is funny.
GIANNASCOLI: Yeah.
RIBEIRO: Wait, The Simpsons LEGO is hard. The Krusty Burger one is hitting. Let’s go upstairs for a second. Oh wait, the cars are hitting.
GIANNASCOLI: Wow.
RIBEIRO: Oh wait, you can touch them.
GIANNASCOLI: Whoa. They didn’t have these–
RIBEIRO: Wait, I have to flick it.
GIANNASCOLI: Wow. It’s all branded everywhere.
RIBEIRO: I think my favorite LEGOs here are the spaceship and the Porsche.
GIANNASCOLI: This spaceship was cool.
RIBEIRO: What is going on in there?
GIANNASCOLI: Inside is like a mini ship. I don’t know what fuck the I’m looking at.
RIBEIRO: It’s a vibe. The Lady Liberty one’s kind of fresh. The hot dog man is kind of fresh.
GIANNASCOLI: The hot dog man’s cute.
RIBEIRO: I rock with him.
GIANNASCOLI: Man. I might buy this steamroller thing real quick.
RIBEIRO: This is one of the sickest things you could have bought on a trip to New York. Successful trip to the LEGO Store, guys.
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WALKING TO M&M STORE
RIBEIRO: Do you want to talk about the album a little bit? Sorry to only ask you about LEGOs so far.
GIANNASCOLI: [Laughs] It’s easier for me to talk about them than other stuff.
RIBEIRO: So, I listened to Headlights. I really love the record.
GIANNASCOLI: Oh, thank you.
RIBEIRO: It’s your first album on a major [label]?
GIANNASCOLI: Yes.
RIBEIRO: Has the process been any different with the label change?
GIANNASCOLI: I was worried that maybe they’d try to make me do something different, but so far it’s been exactly the same.
RIBEIRO: How long did the record take to get together in the last three years-ish?
GIANNASCOLI: I probably started soon after the last one came out. The process is more like I’m always writing casually, and then when an idea becomes more fully formed, then I’ll go into the studio or sit down and record it. And that’ll be once every couple weeks.
RIBEIRO: Do you write a lot at home?
GIANNASCOLI: Most of the time. I’m not at the point yet where I’m booking studio time to just sit and write. I’m still just mostly sitting at home or sitting with my keyboard.
RIBEIRO: I have to give a special shout out to the mandolin. It’s a mandolin in “Afterlife,” right?
GIANNASCOLI: Yeah. I’m glad you liked it.
RIBEIRO: There is just something about your strings. You always have these strings that are super rich and they just sit in your music so well. As someone who’s spent a lot of time with your music, I think that the mix on this one is really tight. Not to say that there was a point where it was bad, but it just feels very harmonized.
GIANNASCOLI: I’m so glad to hear you say that. Jake Portrait mixed and produced with me and he’s done them mixed with me since Beach Music. But we were thinking about that a lot on this one. We were like, “How do we mix it and make it sound like it hasn’t been touched?”
RIBEIRO: Yeah. Because there’s definitely a world where you can miss and then you can just end up making it sound way too big and then it just stops feeling comfortable. It’s cool to hear that it was so purposeful and that you wanted to nail the mix on this.
GIANNASCOLI: Well, it’s tricky. It’s something that I wasn’t aware of until more recently either, because I did it myself for so long. Mixing wasn’t even coming across my radar, because it was just what I was doing in the process. So this time around, we were thinking really hard about how we make it sound really untouched without being abrasive.
RIBEIRO: Was there any part of the album or a song that took a lot of passes to mix right?
GIANNASCOLI: There’s one called “Real Thing” on the album. I think because it’s so minimal, it’s like acoustic guitar, drums, bass, and some other little auxiliary stuff. That took a long time because I kept thinking it needed something else. We worked on it for so long and then it stayed the same, and then we were like, “Okay, it’s done.”
RIBEIRO: It’s easy to be like, “Oh no, we got to keep touching something.” This is your 10th record. Does it feel like a milestone in any way?
GIANNASCOLI: Honestly, no. It doesn’t. I think it’s becoming more clear to me as I get older that this is just something I do, so I’m not really thinking hard about when one record ends and when the other begins. You know what I mean? I’m just always going to be writing, as long as it makes sense with my life.
RIBEIRO: Do you think you’ve found more or less time to write? Has becoming an adult changed the process?
GIANNASCOLI: It’s definitely different. I can’t just sit down and do it anymore, and do whatever I want, which is what I used to do basically. When I was young, I was just like, “I can just do this all day, whenever I want.” If the idea struck me at any time, I could go be like, “Peace, I got to go. I’m excited to go do this.” But now, yeah, it’s just as when you’re an older person, more shit gets kind of–
RIBEIRO: Adult obligations, you got shit to do.
GIANNASCOLI: Yeah.
RIBEIRO: I feel like from the outside looking in, your music feels like a much more adult person is sitting in it. How have your writing subjects and your feelings evolved?
GIANNASCOLI: Definitely. And I wonder sometimes how it’s going to go. I can’t really help what I write about. It’s not because it’s some magic thing or something like, oh, the spirit. It’s not like that. I just mean I can’t force myself to say it. The way I write is very impulsive, and if it’s not impulsive, then I truly can’t gauge whether it’s good or not. Because my gauge is whether it’s making me feel something in the moment. Does that make sense?
RIBEIRO: Yeah. In the way that it would be hard for you to maybe be like, “Okay, 3:00 PM next Tuesday we’re going to write.”
GIANNASCOLI: Yeah, exactly. I can’t sit down and be like, “School sucks,” or something, because I don’t know what that feels like anymore. I can only write about things that evoke some type of emotion in me, because that’s the only way I know that they’re evocative at all. So, I guess my writing style’s changing because things in my life are changing. I wonder sometimes, at what point is my experience just going to become completely irrelevant to the people who are trying to listen? I feel like probably as I get older, it’s going to be alienating more and more people. Maybe that’s not true, but I’m prepared for that.
RIBEIRO: I’m 10 years older now since I first heard your music, but I don’t feel like it’s losing it’s way. But I’m also growing up too, so maybe I’m looking at it from the wrong lens. But then also, my baby brother is sitting there in a bedroom with the lights turned off being like, “I’m going to learn the riff from “Bobby” on the guitar”.
GIANNASCOLI: That’s so cool. That’s uplifting for me.
RIBEIRO: Yeah, your perspective is understood, but from what I’m seeing, it’s leaving an impression beyond just that. And now we’re at the M&M store.
GIANNASCOLI: Fuck yeah.
RIBEIRO: This is what it must have been like watching the sea part. Moses parts the sea, and it’s just like, “Whoa.”
GIANNASCOLI: Pure joy, that’s what we’re feeling.
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M&M STORE
GIANNASCOLI: It smells good in here.
RIBEIRO: But it doesn’t smell like an M&M. Are you drawn to any of the M&M characters here?
GIANNASCOLI: I think I always liked the yellow or red ones. I guess I’m just most familiar with them.
RIBEIRO: They’re best friends, right? Is that how it goes?
GIANNASCOLI: Yeah, but red seems like a darker dude. He’s calculating–
RIBEIRO: And he’s sassier. The yellow one’s kind of like Patrick Star–he’s goofy. Ms. Brown obviously is just like the HBIC [Head Bitch In Charge] vibe. Oh, the green is a lady too. And the blue M&M is clearly the cool guy.
GIANNASCOLI: I don’t know anything about the blue ones. Orange is panic?
RIBEIRO: Yeah, he’s like the anxious one. He’s a tweaker.
GIANNASCOLI: What was the discourse around the green M&M?
RIBEIRO: Well, because she’s kind of sexy, everyone’s like, “An M&M can’t get me hard. Fuck off.” Then she’s like, “But I’m bad as hell.”
GIANNASCOLI: That is so funny.
RIBEIRO: Which M&M are you, Alex?
GIANNASCOLI: I’m the yellow one.
RIBEIRO: I’m probably a blue with an orange rising. I’m definitely not sexy or sassy enough to be the brown or the green M&M.
GIANNASCOLI: That’s so funny.
RIBEIRO: Let’s go upstairs. That’s where they make the M&M’s. That’s where the M&M’s give birth to the other M&M’s. Do you think the big M&M’s lay eggs like they’re a queen bee and that the little M&M’s are like the worker bees?
GIANNASCOLI: Absolutely. There’s purple too and it’s kind of relaxed.
RIBEIRO: Oh, the purple is slept on. Wait, why is the purple one not included downstairs? Why is the yellow one kind of chill?
GIANNASCOLI: The Peanut M&Ms are kind of classier, I feel.
RIBEIRO: Yeah, the Peanut M&M is a chic choice.
GIANNASCOLI: Because it’s like a meal too.
RIBEIRO: He’s low-key shy with it. It feels calmer in here than the LEGO score. Oh my God. There’s a Skittles vending machine in here.
GIANNASCOLI: I thought they were rivals.
RIBEIRO: That’s not an M&M, bro.
GIANNASCOLI: You can’t handle the truth! I wonder if it’s the same factory. Oh, they got jewelry.
RIBEIRO: Wait, the M&M jewelry is pretty. The rings are kind of fresh. Do you eat candy?
GIANNASCOLI: Yeah, I love candy.
RIBEIRO: What’s your favorite?
GIANNASCOLI: Either Almond Joy or Reese’s Cups.
RIBEIRO: Reese’s Cup. You know about the Reese’s Fast Break? It’s the candy bar of Reese’s.
GIANNASCOLI: Yeah, that sounds familiar. I don’t think I ever ate one though.
RIBEIRO: I’m partial to those.
GIANNASCOLI: I’m going to get these. The peanut butter and jelly.
RIBEIRO: Can I hit one?
GIANNASCOLI: Yeah. Everybody, go ahead.
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JIMMY’S CORNER
RIBEIRO: This is Jimmy’s corner. Should we run it?
GIANNASCOLI: Let’s do it.
BARTENDER: Let’s grab IDs, please.
RIBEIRO: Should we get a beer?
GIANNASCOLI: I would get one.
RIBEIRO: What about Miller Light?
GIANNASCOLI: I’ll get one of those, too.
RIBEIRO: This is my boyfriend’s favorite bar in New York.
GIANNASCOLI: I understand why.
RIBEIRO: It’s chill in here, right? I’m glad you like it.
GIANNASCOLI: I really like it.
RIBEIRO: Also, if there’s a day to have a fucking 1:30 beer.
GIANNASCOLI: It’s today.
RIBEIRO: I guess as we wrap up, do you want to talk about the album a little more? Is there anything you’re excited for people to experience in it, or are you just happy to get it in front of people?
GIANNASCOLI: Truthfully, I’m just happy to be able to do this, to make music and shit. I’m not trying to be humble or something, it’s a really nice job. I get to do what I enjoy. There’s no particular part where I’m like, “This is going to blow people’s minds,” because I’m just doing the same thing I always do.
RIBEIRO: That makes sense. Let’s say I hadn’t listened to the album, where do you think you’d start? Do you have an idea?
GIANNASCOLI: Wow, good question. At this point, I don’t know. I don’t have the input of the record label being like, oh “Afterlife” will be the single, and “June Guitar” will be the second single.
RIBEIRO: Is June Guitar the one that goes like, “Don’t make me, don’t make me, don’t make…”
GIANNASCOLI: Yeah.
RIBEIRO: I’m one of those people who I actually have a bad habit of approaching an album, where I get really to one song and just keep hitting the same one. Sometimes I’m not ready to sit with the story from top to bottom or something.
GIANNASCOLI: That’s how I am. I still don’t engage with the full story of an album ever. I don’t even make my own albums that way. You know what I mean?
RIBEIRO: Yeah.
GIANNASCOLI: I think the magic is almost an unintentional story. But like you’re saying, I get into one song obsessively, another song obsessively, and then I burn them out one by one. And then by the time I burned out the last one, I can go back to the first one.
RIBEIRO: Me too. I have this obsessive spiral about a song, but then a week later you can’t touch it, because you make yourself sick with it.
GIANNASCOLI: It fucking sucks. I hate it.
RIBEIRO: Is there a song that you could think of that had a moment like that for you recently?
GIANNASCOLI: There’s a song my brother-in-law showed me called “Pets” by Porno for Pyros.
RIBEIRO: That’s such a sick song for you to say. That whole album is really cool. Oh my gosh. What time is it?
GIANNASCOLI: 1:38.
RIBEIRO: 1:38. Dude, thank you for being with us in this crazy hot, insane day.
