Mac DeMarco - Guitar

Between his prodigious streaming numbers and famously low-key lifestyle, Mac DeMarco could probably get away with not working again for the foreseeable future. This newfound place of comfort has freed him up, in recent years, to pursue more esoteric projects than we’re used to (see the instrumental ‘Five Easy Hot Dogs’ and the mammoth, 199-track ‘One Wayne G’), and has also granted him pause from a touring lifestyle that, by his own admission, was beginning to push him deeper into unhealthy habits. So why return to conventional records? Perhaps it’s because he once again has something to say: he was audibly running out of ideas on 2019’s last album proper, ‘Here Comes the Cowboy’, but on the simply-titled ‘Guitar’, he returns to lyrical form. He has always been deceptively deep underneath his class-clown persona, and sure enough, here he riffs on regret (‘Phantom’), mortality (‘Terror’) and - perhaps most affectingly - the yawning divide between his past and current life (‘Home’). As the title suggests, the stripped-back instrumental palette leans on melodic, often acoustic guitar lines. If there’s a curveball in what is a charmingly lo-fi release, it’s the higher vocal register he settles into for most of these tracks - something that might alienate fans of his tighter, poppier work circa ‘Salad Days’. Regardless, Mac’s back - for real, this time.