Alex G isn’t letting go any time soon. He’s got his foot on the pedal, his head in the clouds, his band on the road, his partner by his side, his son. His 10th album is coming out on a major label, and there’s still a treasure trove of childhood memories to dig up, to try and bridge the disparate pieces and fill the missing ones. “I’ve searched far and wide/ For a place like this/ Now I can close my eyes,” he sings at one point. And what happens then, in the blackness? Maybe his voice thrives, writing out every word, rescuing his younger self. Maybe it gets all distorted, firing up his imagination. Maybe he’ll get dizzy with the big bright light; maybe he’ll miss the one glaring right at him. Still, he won’t step off. So we get Headlights: hushed, gorgeous, and warmly elusive, a high watermark in a career full of them.

1. June Guitar

Something about hitting rock bottom stirs echoes of young love and childhood innocence, just like that fingerpicked guitar might bring back memories of a favorite acoustic song of yours. A swaying synth line glares over it all like a time machine, but the singer remains anchored in the present: “Want you down here swinging low with me” could be directed at a partner or his own child self, shimmering into view. “Love ain’t for the young, anyhow/ Something that you learn from falling down,” he sings. But mature love has a strange, quietly miraculous way of reconnecting us with that younger self, and it feels more like ascending.

2. Real Thing

The song makes one of the record’s most overt references to signing to a major label, but it just goes to show the elusiveness of the real thing – a placeholder for all those things we’re socialized into chasing: success, happiness, fame. Or maybe the real thing is just doing right by the people you care about, which may or not entail those other things.  “Yeah, you spilled the real thing all over the floor,” he sings, which you could imagine as literal cash or a symbolic truth laid bare in the middle of an argument. While G distorts his voice a little on the opener, it’s wholly clear on ‘Real Thing’, like a subtle bid for authenticity, though the slightly off-kilter, bent guitar notes are a touch unnerving.

3. Afterlife

The sparkling mandolin; the gleaming falsetto; the sticky-like-summer-sweat hook: ‘Afterlife’ stands out as one of Alex G’s best singles, not least because it’s one of the few where he thrillingly sings about the big bright light he’s shooting toward. You may call it a thirst for creativity, but making meaning still doesn’t warrant making sense. “Let me write down/ Every word/ Once I was a mockingbird,” he sings absurdly, without undercutting the next couplet’s commitment: “Not an angel/ But I’m your man.” A man who hasn’t forgotten what it’s like being a kid, precisely because he now has one.

4. Beam Me Up

“I feel like the song is, its power is in kind of ambiguity,” Alex G told Pitchfork, which sounds like a way to really undercut the sincerity of its opening lines: “Some things I do for love/ Some things I do for money/ It ain’t like I don’t want it/It ain’t like I’m above it.” In the actual context of the song, though, it’s true that the lyrics that follow – subconscious, surreal, a little sci-fi – have a way of obscuring what he actually means. Yet thread the lines and suddenly ambition seems like a better word than ambiguity: a football way up in the sky becomes a rocket, and well, who comes to mind then?

5. Spinning

There’s a haunted, textural quality to Alex G’s guitar, but the string arrangement, by his partner Molly  Germer, makes all the difference. More than polishing or even opening up the song, they mirror his voice and lyrics as they burrow inward, remembering a scene “like a bad dream” that “was funny all along.” It sounds like caving in, but even that sounds better in a song.

6. Louisiana

Here’s Alex G with his voice all warped, singing about a woman named Louise like she has nothing to with the song, spinning a guitar riff that sounds like his own version of Midwife’s “heaven metal.” It’s bathed in reverb, melodies buried in the mud, yet distinguishes itself from similarly hypnotic music with those steady, sky-splitting drums, which won’t let your mind wander too far. And when they boom in the chorus alongside overdriven guitars, Louisiana is anywhere you want it to be.

7. Bounce Boy

There were flashes of hyperpop on God Save the Animals, and Headlights drifts back into that territory at a most unexpected moment, favouring a drum machine and dialing up the vocal processing. The lyrics, though, are in the same vein, prayerful and otherworldly.

8. Oranges

The album’s head-in-the-clouds middle stretch sort of ends with this track, which renders childhood fear (‘Oranges’ being the object of it) with tender lucidity, as if singing so pleasantly about “storming in full of sin” is one way of washing it clean. You can’t help but like him in this mode, not when it’s wrapped in such a blessed, shimmery twang.

9. Far and Wide

It sounds like Alex G tried a dozen different ways to sing this song – to buttress or block out its vulnerability – and the cartoonishly nasally voice he lands on might remind you of Kermit or Daniel Johnston, which is precisely the point. It should be funny, even a little cringe, and yet, given its sequencing, gets at the shattered young heart of the album, through a strangely peaceful moment where the pieces don’t make the whole look so broken. You might notice the drawl going away towards the end: “All the world was left/ In faded color/ Didn’t we give everything/ To be with one another.” A rhetorical question in a world of absurd ones, driven home by another eerily swooning arrangement by Germer.

10. Headlights

Don’t let the brooding tone fool you – the title track houses the album’s real jumpscare moment, a brush with death that descends into insanity: “Let the money pave my way,” he sings, trolling the skeptics. Even if you choose not to read into it, it’s just a perfect late-night driving song.

11. Is It Still You In There?

Over jazzy piano straight out of a Charlie Brown special, what sounds like a children’s choir – but is actually Germer, fellow Philadelphia-based violinist Hannah Nicholas, and cellist Carolina Diazgranados – pose a series of questions. Us critics like to paint Giannascoli’s lyrics as impenetrable, but how clearer could it be that that’s his child self on the other side? Not to get stuck in the past, but nudge him to be better, be real, and remember to get lost in the in-between. “Won’t you let the roses bloom for me today?”

12. Logan Hotel (Live)

The band here is Samuel Acchione on guitar, John Heywood on guitar bass, and Tom Kelly drums, and the “live” tag emphasizes their presence rather than marking an actual live recording. After all, who better to rip through a song opening with the lines “I’ve been on the road for a long time/ I’m about to lose my mind”? The key word here is about: the singer is caught between losing his mind and not, staying and not, being Alex G and not. “I think that no matter what you choose, now/ You’re gonna have to lose, now.” Maybe losing ain’t so bad, though. Maybe you get to earn a lot more than a pile of cash.