7/10

With his tenth studio album 'Headlights', Alex G unveils a whole crooked, tender, brilliantly warped universe he’s spent years crafting along with him. His major label debut doesn’t look to polish away the oddities that made him a cult favourite in the first place; instead, it leans into them, delivering a record that’s just as weird, warm, and quietly unsettling as ever, only now with a wider lens.

From the opening track 'June Guitar', there’s a familiar homespun intimacy, but it’s cut with a heightened clarity. It’s like you’ve been hearing his voice through a cracked cassette for a decade, and now suddenly someone’s wiped the dust off the speakers. Songs drift between acoustic lullabies and bleary-eyed experiments, where melancholy often shares space with absurdity. Tracks like ‘Afterlife’ and ‘Real Thing’ are deceptively simple at first glance, but linger like riddles you can’t quite solve.

There’s always been a sense with Alex G that he’s writing songs in a parallel world, one where time slips, identities blur, and meaning resists straight lines. Lyrics dart between deadpan humour and emotional gut punches, and even the most straightforward arrangements seem to shimmer with unreality. It’s folk music for the end of the internet, indie-rock filtered through a dream journal.

What sets this album apart though, is its sense of comfort in contradiction. Alex G no longer sounds like he’s trying to straddle the line between bedroom recluse and festival headliner, he’s now both, and that friction fuels the record’s strange electricity. Even the more cinematic moments, like the ghostly, looping 'Oranges', feel personal and precise, like postcards mailed from the bottom of the ocean.

'Headlights' isn’t Alex G reinventing himself. It’s him showing that his world was always big enough for the rest of us. You don’t listen to these songs so much as live inside them. And with this album, the house just got a little larger, the lights a little brighter, and the ghosts a little louder.