On a brisk Friday afternoon a couple weeks ago, Stephen Malkmus was sitting in an empty bar beside the B.Q.E. in Williamsburg, talking about the admissions process at the University of Virginia during his undergrad days in the 1980s. Though Malkmus grew up in California, his father had gone to school in Charlottesville, which made him a legacy, which meant that his application went into the in-state pool, or at least that’s what his mother always told him . . .
“This sounds like white privilege,” he said, as a disarming smile appeared on his face. “Because it is.”
Malkmus is 52, but still carries himself with the hair-in-his-eyes insouciance that made him a poster boy for Gen X as the front man of Pavement. Now, nearly two decades into his second act, he was in town for one of his last shows on a tour supporting Sparkle Hard, his 2018 record with his band the Jicks. This week, Malkmus will release his second record in less than a year, a solo effort named Groove Denied, that sees him—sort of—depart from the polished confines he’s come to inhabit lately, and into looser territory occupied in part by New Wave synthesizers and drum machines. Malkmus produced and engineered the record himself in his home studio. He’s cited the Human League and Pete Shelley’s Homosapien as influences.
Some of Groove Denied recalls—in ethos, if not sound—Pavement’s early slapdash days working on borrowed studio time. It is a more difficult record to approach as a listener, and its title nods to the fact that his longtime label, Matador, rejected it when he first delivered it—or at least asked that he put out his more market-friendly guitar record first.
Malkmus, who knows material when he sees it, has made much of this fact.
Malkmus’s college days came up while discussing one of Groove Denied’s janglier entries, “Rushing the Acid Frat.” The song’s title and its “Louie Louie” chord progression, he said, grew out of his remembrances of the second-tier stoner fraternities that populated campuses at the time. They were more interested in Grateful Dead tapes than Southern tradition, but still had houses and money and decent enough taste to pay good bands.
“You’re like, ‘Whoa, this place is weird. I think I want to join here, but it’s kind of scary,’” he said, laughing as he recalled the idea of writing a song you’d hear in one such house. “‘I’ve got to go up to the top floor, and sit on a low bed, and do a bong, and listen to Little Feat.’”
When I mentioned that the song’s keggers-and-bongs theme felt a little evocative of another cross section of 80s campus life—the one the news-reading public got an adult dose of last year during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings—he pondered the comparison.
“That world seems so old to me—like it just doesn’t exist anymore, you know?” he said. “I guess it does.”
Malkmus has made a career of aloof vibes and indirect lyrics, but in person—in a wrinkled white shirt, trucker hat, and what appeared to be Tory Burch aviators—he came off as the self-aware guitar god next door. He lives in Portland with his partner, the artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and their two daughters. He follows the N.B.A. generally. His kids love Billie Eilish, and he does, too. (“Huge fan. . . I think it’s going to stick for a while.”) He’s up to date on Taylor Swift’s standing in the collective tween mind-set. (“How does that feel? I know she doesn’t give a fuck, but just to have a 13-year-old decide you’re over, you know?”) He’s happy the culture gave Tyler, the Creator room to mature. (“He got time to fuck around.”) He reads theory and is pretty good at Twitter. He has thoughts on millennials!
“I know the statistics bear out that it’s bleaker now for millennials,” he said. “The numbers show that it’s even bleaker, but it wasn’t like a total walk in the park. I’m not trying to say we’re all in the same boat here, but there’s been cycles of fucking misery.”
Still, guys, he gets it.
“I can totally see people, younger people, saying, like, ‘Get out of the way, privileged white guys of the 90s.’” he said. “I can see being frustrated by that.”
Malkmus is, in other words, a dad—literally, yes, but also unavoidably in the broader sense the descriptor has taken on. Because he’s spent the better part of three decades as a standard-bearer for a certain strain of indie rock, the idea that he’d made a record his label had rejected came as something of a surprise. Isn’t throwing knuckleballs at one’s label kids’ stuff? As it turns out, that reading might be just a touch of marketing. While Matador founder Chris Lombardi did fly to Portland to persuade him to sit on the record, it wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds. Or at least Malkmus makes it sound less so, now that the actual record is being released.
“They were like, ‘You know, we don’t know. I don’t think this is the right move for you right now,’” he said about its initial reception. “That’s all it was.”
Still, he was taken aback—at first. Matador has released his records since Pavement’s debut LP, Slanted and Enchanted, in 1992, and this was new. But he was set to record what would become Sparkle Hard anyway, so he got over himself. “I’m not really thinking about what’s marketable,” he said. “I’m just thinking about what I did for the last six months, and I’m having fun listening in my car, and like, ‘This is really different. I like this more than the other one.’ So much of us, myself very much included—so many people live in fear of rejection.”
There’s something admirable in the idea of an indie-rock stalwart making a difficult record at this stage in his career. Certainly, he could put out one of those guitar records every three or four years, tour it, and do O.K. for himself. Presented with that idea, he seemed to wince.
“There’s plenty of very talented artists that just don’t get their dues, due to getting older and making something that’s just O.K.” he said. “There are minefields out there. You cannot be playing as big a place as you want to play, or you have to go back to your old band.”
And Malkmus, subtly, has been showing a willingness lately to stretch himself. “Bike Lane,” one of the standout tracks on Sparkle Hard, was a back-and-forth consideration of Freddie Gray’s 2015 death in police custody and myopic urban liberalism. It was maybe as politically direct as he’s been lyrically. On Groove Denied, there’s “Ocean of Revenge,” which tells the story of an indentured servant in colonial Mississippi who is hanged for murdering his employer. It is basically linear historical fiction. “Come Get Me,” the new record’s catchiest song, is downright vulnerable: “Won’t somebody come get me? / Out on a limb here, I can’t walk.”
So is Stephen Malkmus, undisputed champion of the oblique couplet, going soft on us? Probably not. When I mention “Come Get Me,” he makes sure that I’m aware that the record also has a song called “Boss Viscerate” on it. Anyway, to hear him tell it, a certain part of all this was just habit-breaking for habit-breaking’s sake.
“That’s the thing that I think a lot of us get into in middle age—just the way you get into some patterns,” he said. “I make a demo of this, and I work on the lyrics, and I present it to a group. They like it, and then they play it, and we transform it to an even more presentable state. There’s a Rick Rubin in your mind that says, ‘Try it again. You can do it.’”
He wanted to mess around. A large part of Groove Denied can be chalked up to the fact that Malkmus updated his home recording equipment, and the upgrades affected his drafting process. He wound up with a collection of songs he felt he did not need to embellish with lowercase-c classic-rock signifiers: fancy E.Q.s, a good engineer, a bass player. “It didn’t sound like demos to me anymore,” he said. “It sounds a bit lo-fi and a bit homemade, like a lot of music that I like anyway.” The results may take a listen or two to warm to, and the sequencing, which stacks the synth-driven stuff early, seems designed to make it that way. Ultimately, even if it is a little loopy here and a little dreamy there, Groove Denied is pretty recognizably a Malkmus record. There are melodies, and there are guitars.
As a semi-regular Internet denizen, Malkmus, like most of us, is fascinated by the rate at which we must now consume and judge content, and he’s interested in how the record will be received. He might even have expressed a modicum of anxiety about it.
“Nothing’s guaranteed,” he said. “You have to . . . I mean, people don’t have time for a lot of stuff that they might have in the 90s.”
