Bartees Strange is cracking open his coffin

John Carpenter has his synth scores, Guillermo Del Toro his fixation on spindly monster men, and though he practices an entirely different discipline, Bartees Strange has a similar habit. The Baltimore-based singer, songwriter, producer, and bandleader (born Bartees Cox Jr.) evades a signature sound, smash-cutting from midwest emo riffs to rap verses to house beats and pop choruses however it suits him, but he links each of his albums with references and recurring motifs. He fit the mould of a fearful auteur long before he announced the title of his third LP, Horror.

“I’m dipping from the same well a lot,” says Strange. “It’s kind of interesting to see I’ve been the same the whole time.”

A brief and incomplete history: in 2017, he released the album Magic Boy under the name Bartees & the Strange Fruit. On a country tinged track called “IDK”, he test-rode the chord structure for “Mustang”, a charging indie rock anthem later recorded for his breakout debut LP as Bartees Strange, 2020’s Live Forever. Follow the tracklist down from “Mustang” and you find “Flagey God”, a beat-driven ballad with a melody (specifically on the words “Girl, you ask me if I get the deja vu”) that resurfaced as the pre-chorus of “Wretched”, the go-for-broke electronic pop single that anchored his 2022 record Farm to Table. (“And it is deja vu,” Strange all but winks.) That album ended with an acoustic campfire number called “Hennessy”, which brings us to Horror. And of course, it opens with “Too Much”, a song built on the same foundation.

“It’s a slightly different tuning, but with the same shapes – very similar chords. I was writing them all at the same time, and it was like, ‘Too Much’, ‘Hennessey’, ‘That’s why it’s hard to be sober,’” says Strange (alluding to Horror’s lead single, “Sober”). “It’s like a puppet master, ‘I can do whatever I want’ kinda vibe… I’m having fun.”

The easter eggs are fun to uncover, too. In the pattern of the recently departed David Lynch, they make up the fabric of a singular sensory world – one where anything can happen genre-wise without breaking the chain of Strange’s catalogue. It couldn’t possibly be a surprise when he releases an album like Horror, adding shades of 70s funk and soft rock to his already colour-spattered palette and exploring an overarching theme of fear. Lyrically, Strange always combines wish fulfilment with chilling reality (he was cashing checks from Universal on the Farm to Table track “Cosigns”, then watching George Floyd’s daughter mourn on “Hold the Line”). This time, the reality just looms a little larger.

“I realised some of the songs I was writing were just more real,” Strange says of the album’s genesis, which began around the time he was making Farm to Table in 2021. “It was hitting a vulnerable place in me, that I was like, ‘I don’t even know if I wanna go there right now’... These songs are about intimacy, songs about Blackness, and not feeling like you can live anywhere without feeling like people are gonna take everything away from you…all these little things that, as you get older, you go through over and over again until you conquer it.”

Beyond the bloody smear of the title font and the found-footage video for “Too Much”, Strange works with everyday fears, more Ari Aster dread than Sam Raimi splatstick. On “Sober” – a restless, Fleetwood Mac-esque groove – he confronts the fear of perpetual romantic dysfunction. On “17”, the record’s emotional climax, he confronts the existential fear he’s carried through his life as a Queer, Black person (“The first time that I felt impending doom / was realising I’m too Black for the room”). The minimal, folky “Baltimore” sags with the weariness of a life lived in fear of your surroundings, moving from city to city in search of a safe place to call home (he calls the titular city “as safe as it gets,” and “a perfect place to plop down”). He says working through these fears can make you stronger, and it can also make you an object of fear yourself.

“You grow up being afraid of everything, and then everyone becomes afraid of you,” he says. “As you become more actualised, and as you face your fears and move through them and become a more self-aware person, people become more afraid of that. Especially when you’re a Black person and you become someone that has more power in their life – more agency.”

Live Forever won Strange a taste of indie success, landing on best-of-the-year lists at publications such as Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and NPR. For Farm to Table, he signed to historic indie label 4AD (home of his personal heroes, The National) and continued racking up list placements and collabs – high-profile gigs such as his appearance on last year’s self-titled Bleachers album.

Indie success can be transitory, though, and on the careening rocker “Wants / Needs”, Strange sweats his precarious position as an unpredictable artist who’s won expectant fans, and who needs to win more to sustain a career. He visualises himself buried alive, an image reminiscent of Jane Schoenbrun’s Queer allegorical horror I Saw the TV Glow (with an all-star soundtrack Strange himself contributed to). “I try to be grateful for living while punching the top of a coffin,” he sings. “I still wanna live forever, but I’m not the one you want.”

“Live Forever, when that record came out, it was such a big thing for me. All of a sudden, people knew who I was, and there’s this fear of never being able to grow past your first thing. No matter how good the following things are, people always want the old version of you. But in that line, I’m saying, ‘That person is the same person that’s here today, and even when you wanted me then, it wasn’t enough of you,’” he says, laughing. “I fully acknowledge how weird it is to be complaining that you are not successful enough when you’ve experienced success. It kinda makes you look like an asshole to say that, but I feel like there’s a ceiling here that I’m trying to punch through, and that’s a reality of my situation right now.”

Even if Strange isn’t set for life, the label deal has perks, like the budget he used to hire Jack Antonoff as co-producer and book recording time at Electric Lady Studios. He also sought out brothers Yves and Lawrence Rothman, who – on songs like “Loop Defenders”, the album’s scariest cut – taught him the secret to the fat, layered drum sound heard on Yves Tumor records (Sean Bowie being one of Strange’s few peers in adventurousness). With 4AD already on board, Strange had more time to tweak the songs in his Baltimore home studio, but more importantly, Farm to Table gave him the confidence to face his fears and come into his own like an indie rock Jordan Peele on Horror.

“I was like, ‘I guess I can work with anyone, but I’m starting to believe that I might be the secret sauce in my music.’”