There’s theatrical pop, and then there’s MAX. If you thought building a life-size Rubik’s Cube to sing on top of was too much, you clearly haven’t met a man who wanted his album rollout to feel like Purple Rain and a Wes Anderson movie got drunk together on cotton candy vodka and dreams of Broadway.
“I really tried my best to create that world that I would be proud of,” MAX says about Color Vision, a record four years in the making, born of post-op clarity, Pixar optimism, and an undying love for soul singers who “rip their heart out and paint the track with it.”
Before the technicolor glow-up, there was trauma. A surgery nearly silenced his voice and jolted him out of chasing hits-for-hire. “You think you’re invincible until you’re not,” he says. “And then you realize—why am I not creating what I actually want to create?”
What he wanted was a “slightly out there” world where heartbreak and euphoria lived in a bubblegum utopia. Think Pet Sounds meets Etta James, but with K-pop verses and costumes fit for a Wes Anderson fever dream. “I’m a sucker for romance,” MAX admits. “But I also believe trauma can be part of a happy ending.”
The album’s closer, “There Is a God,” is the kind of song that would’ve been a straight piano ballad in lesser hands. Instead, MAX wrapped it in lush string arrangements and cryptic sentiment. “I love when a title sets up one thing and delivers something completely different,” he says, nodding to Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks, whom he once played onscreen. “You want it to feel classic—but still weird. I think all great pop songs have at least a little weird in them.”
Even “Blueberry Eyes,” his sugary duet with BTS’s SUGA, carries its own subversion—a Korean rap verse, a theatrical key line, and a video that starts in a bathtub and spirals into a literal animated fantasy. “It was never the plan,” MAX grins. “He just asked me to be on his project first, and I was like, ‘Well then you’re definitely coming on mine.’ I didn’t tell him to sing in English. I just said, ‘Here’s the story, here’s the world. How do you fit in?’”
The result was an unlikely hit, a rare bridge between East and West pop, and a reminder that good art often happens when you let go of control. “Sometimes,” MAX says, “it was always right in front of you. You just didn’t see it yet.”
The same could be said for his own wife—“this really beautiful British girl” he used to see at parties. “I wasn’t allowed to get too friendly back then,” he laughs. “Now she’s the one who gets all the good songs.”
Touring plans include dragging that giant Rubik’s Cube across the world, inviting collaborators to jump on stage, and transforming venues into kaleidoscopic wonderlands. “It’s all the things I hoped for,” he says. “Theatrical. Surreal. On my knees, singing my heart out.”
It’s pop, sure—but MAX wants to remind you it’s not just catchy. It’s cinema. It’s soul. It’s strange. And that’s the point.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
