It takes a special kind of person to deliver a quiet acoustic song about nuclear annihilation and make you want to hug a tree. Enter José González, back from a six-year recording pause with Local Valley, an album that finds the Swedish troubadour musing on tribalism, AI extinction events, and the joy of singing “honey on your titties” to his girlfriend.
“I’m not lazy,” he insists, after noting the time gap. “I became a dad. I toured with an orchestra. There was a pandemic.” It’s a fair list. But even with the delay, the album’s themes are more urgent than ever. “There’s a mantra to this record,” I suggest. “You literally sing ‘we’re all in this together.’ Is that a statement or a plea?”
“Both,” he replies, pivoting effortlessly from Carl Sagan to existential risk theory. “We need to take care of ourselves. But it’s also a plea to envision a common future.”
That future, apparently, has about a one-in-six chance of making it through the next hundred years unscathed. González cites the book The Precipice by Toby Ord and rattles off a list of threats—pandemics, nukes, AI—as casually as if reading off a grocery list. “The risks are a bit too high,” he says, with an almost Zen calm. “But the potential is amazing too. That’s what Visions is about.”
So yes, the apocalypse is coming, but it’ll have a gorgeous guitar line. And probably a little Latin rhythm too.
“I’ve been inspired by West African music for years,” González says, name-checking Tinariwen, Bombino, and Afel Bocoum. There are splashes of samba, nods to Ghanaian highlife, and “riff-oriented” jams sprinkled throughout Local Valley. And then there’s “Swing,” a song he first wrote in Swedish until his girlfriend told him, basically, to knock it off. “We rewrote it in English and it worked better,” he says.
It’s not the only moment she influenced. One of the album’s most disarming tracks is “Lilla G,” written for his daughter. “I was just singing to her every day,” he says, shrugging off the fact that most of us singing to toddlers don’t accidentally write poetic minimalism. “Little darling. That’s it. Just over and over.”
There’s something deeply González about that—the same guy who talks like a data analyst at a climate summit also writes lullabies with all the emotional depth of Leonard Cohen. But then there’s that song. “Honey Honey,” the closing track, features a lyric that you absolutely don’t expect: “honey on your titties.”
“Yeah,” he smiles. “I wanted an album that showed more of me.”
And apparently, “more of me” includes a sensual collaboration with DJ Koze that began life as a track called “Music on My Teeth.” González wrote the lyrics, but the vibe is pure laid-back seduction. “A bit of sensuality was needed on the album,” he says. Who knew?
For someone known for whispered vocals and existential lyrics, González also seems preoccupied with “dudes”—specifically, doomsday dudes, the swaggering know-it-alls of every civilization. “Many cultures base their whole ideologies on these dudes,” he says, mildly exasperated. “Even Buddha was a doomsday dude.”
It’s this ability to drift from humor to profundity and back that gives Local Valley its shape. There’s even a cover of Junip’s “Line of Fire” (“It’s one of my favorite songs”), plus a Laleh cover that contemplates mortality with what he calls a “celebratory tone.”
And yet, in spite of all the philosophical baggage, the album never collapses under its own weight. That’s the González paradox: songs that reckon with the end of humanity—delivered in a way that makes you want to lie in the grass and watch the clouds.
Just maybe don’t Google Translate the Swedish lyrics unless you’re prepared to confront some doomsday dudes of your own.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
