Alt-J don’t exactly do swagger. “We’re not very good at being rock stars,” Gus Unger-Hamilton admits. “So it’s kind of nice to let the lights be the front man of the band.” On their current tour, those lights literally do the job: the trio perform inside a cube of mesh and projections, surrounded by illusions of water tanks, burning candles, and, presumably, whatever other fever dream their lighting designers can conjure.
It’s not that Alt-J are shy — more like allergic to cliché. Even when Gus straps on a Hofner violin bass, McCartney-style, he doesn’t suddenly morph into some leg-on-the-monitor guitar god. Still, he jokes: “Since I started playing bass, I actually feel like I’m in a band now. Keyboard is always a bit awkward. Bass makes me feel like a band man.”
The Beatles loom large on The Dream. Alt-J finished mastering the album in June 2021, just before Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary hypnotized the music world. “Seeing them just recording live takes, even rehearsal takes — it kind of made us realize we’d already stripped things back a bit,” Gus says. The result is Alt-J attempting, in his words, “a garage-rock record, or at least as close as we’ll ever get to one.”
Not that “garage rock” means straightforward. The album lurches from doo-wop harmonies to opera cameos. “Joe has these mad ideas I almost always say no to,” Gus laughs. “The opera singer? I was like, God, please no. But then she came in and it sounded great. Less Freddie Mercury, more like a chopped-up tape sample. With us, nothing’s really off-limits.”
They even drag friends and family into the mix. “It’s like a bay leaf in a stew,” Gus says. “You can’t always tell what it does, but it adds flavor. And if you actually get the bay leaf in your mouth — well, I kind of like that. It’s like winning a prize.”
Lyrically, the stew veers dark. “Death has always been a big thing for us,” Gus shrugs. “We’re just getting older. We have kids now. You start thinking about it more and more.” “Losing My Mind” flirts with serial-killer voyeurism. “True crime is more popular than ever, and we’re all disgusted by killers but also taking pleasure from the stories. How different are we, really, from the people we’re watching?”
Alt-J’s characters — killers, detectives, doomed lovers — are essentially “dramatic monologues,” fragments of people who may or may not exist. “Fans love to dissect the lyrics, turn them into art, build backstories. We just like throwing the ideas out there and letting people run with them.” Gus even half-seriously floats a comic book spinoff. “I can picture it on the merch stand now — the Alt-J graphic novel.”
Meanwhile, the band keeps An Awesome Wave alive. Ten years on, they’re still playing most of it every night. “We’ve never stopped celebrating it,” Gus says. “Some bands ditch their first album in their setlist. We’ve always kept ours in, because we love those songs and the fans love them.”
And yet, it’s The Dream that feels like the band’s boldest statement — a record equal parts macabre, playful, and cinematic. “It’s one of those onion-skin albums — you peel away and keep finding more,” Gus says.
Just don’t expect Alt-J to peel away the lights anytime soon. They’re perfectly happy to let the projections do the preening, while they stand in the cube, conjuring killers, operas, and bay leaves.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
