G-Eazy has one rule for the freak show: all are welcome—just don’t expect him to play it safe.
The Bay Area rapper turned New York transplant has always been chasing an aesthetic, but on Freak Show, he’s finally ditched the polished rebel act and gone full dark carnival. “It’s like, welcome to this place where you can let your guard down,” he says. “We’re all a little mad here.”
And by mad, he means anxious, overexposed, and possibly rocking eyeliner while name-dropping Bowie. “You can be whoever you want to be,” he adds. “Create. Push things a little harder.”
That push shows up in full force across Freak Show, an album that opens with a warped circus monologue, lurches into a Cypress Hill-sampling banger (“Superstar”), slides into therapy-session honesty on “Anxiety,” and still finds time to nod to The Clash, the Beatles, and Dylan. You’d call it a genre-bending fever dream if it didn’t sound so damn calculated.
“I like to think of myself as a sponge,” he says, reflecting on the global influences he’s absorbed in Paris, London, and now Manhattan. “Every place has its own energy, and what those vibrations give you—it inspires the music.”
But Freak Show isn’t just globetrotting cosplay. It’s painfully human. “It’s more self-accepting and less self-critical,” he says. “It’s brutally, bluntly honest.” On “Anxiety,” he lays it bare: panic attacks, insecurity, shame. No metaphors, no hiding.
“Once you do it, it’s liberating,” he says. “You just own it. You embrace it. And then you realize you’re not the only one with the issues.”
The dude who once romanticized Paris and dressed like a Tumblr James Dean is now running around New York with Jerry Seinfeld and Aaron Judge, rapping about impostor syndrome, sampling “The Class L,” and channeling Tom Waits via trap beats. If it sounds chaotic, that’s because it is. But he swears there’s math behind the madness.
“If you take a song from one genre and just replace the drums or change the tempo, it becomes something else,” he explains. “It’s just numbers. You slow it down, you put your drums under it, now it’s a rap song.”
He’s also chasing a vibe. His Shazam history could double as a crate-digging confession. “I’ve been in Ubers, Walgreens, wherever,” he laughs. “If I hear something, I’ll grab it. I know what I like, and I know how to flip it.”
And sometimes, that flip is cinematic. Literally. “I’ll play movie trailers on mute while I’m working on a song,” he admits. “See if it feels like it fits.” That cinematic instinct led him to All Souls, a moody indie flick where he plays a “real dark” character and gets a taste of rookie life again. “You’re starting over. It doesn’t come naturally. It’s humbling—in a good way.”
The music videos bleed into that same space. Eyeliner? Gothic overtones? A touch of Depeche Mode cosplay? Bring it on. “I’ve played it safe before,” he says. “I’ve held back. And there’s been so much inside of me that I’ve never had the chance to express.”
That changes now.
“I mean, Bowie’s hanging right there next to Prince,” he says, gesturing toward the camera. “Those guys pushed the boundaries. Why not?”
The real freak show isn’t the makeup or the melodies—it’s the audacity to be weird, wounded, and dead serious about it. “This is art,” G-Eazy says. “Be the character.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
