Giannascoli spent most of his childhood 20 minutes away, in suburban Havertown, Pennsylvania. School was always a breeze, so he did whatever work he needed to land on the honor roll and focused the rest of his energy on making songs. His parents bought an Apple computer when he was in 6th grade, at which point he started writing electronic songs using GarageBand—primitive constructions that he says sounded “like Aphex Twin if he was stupid." His varied experiments with writing music collaboratively, like the “goth techno" he made with his cool older sister or the pop-rock that accidentally “ended up being punk" he recorded with his high school band, The Skin Cells, always led Giannascoli to the same conclusion: he works best alone. “When you're talking to yourself, you make fluid decisions," he says of the song-making process. “With another person it takes fucking forever."
On the songs Giannascoli releases as Alex G, he explores topics like mental illness, the solipsistic effects of drugs, the bummed-out lives of degenerate friends, and the singular pain of missing someone who doesn't miss you back. It's bleak stuff, but it can be comforting, too. His sonic palette fluctuates; Giannascoli experiments with distorted atmospherics and white noise (or maybe that's just a fortuitous byproduct of his low-budget setup), country-western rawness with banjos and lazily-strummed acoustics, and even crunchy electronic textures. Mostly, though, he's inhabiting a classic indie aesthetic: meandering guitar solos, occasional toe-dips into psychedelic waters and, most importantly, melodies that stick. Like Elliott Smith, who seemed to succeed whether he was crafting cinematic music with involved string sections or whispery folk-pop or something else entirely, Alex G has a pliable sound. He often toys with perspective, too, channeling various characters through which to tell his demented short stories (his Bandcamp URL, for example, is named after the 14-year-old female subject of his song, "Sandy"). But most often, like on the song “Big World" from his album Winner, he sings with a narrative voice that could only really be his own, or a thinly-veiled version of it: Somebody told me I shouldn't go to school/ I should just play guitar and try to break the rules/ I thought I'd do it but I didn't start/ I couldn't bring myself to break mommy's heart. It's a lyric that scrolls through my brain when he reminds me, on more than one occasion during the reporting of this story, that his mom is going to read it.
