Alex G’s cryptic, heartfelt indie rock has earned him friends in interesting places: He contributed guitar and arrangements to Frank Ocean’s Endless and Blonde, he co-wrote and produced about half of Halsey’s The Great Impersonator, he’s toured with Foo Fighters and he soundtracked Jane Schoenbrun’s 2024 movie I Saw the TV Glow—a movie that, like G’s music, seemed almost instantly destined to be a cult classic, playing with nostalgia for early-’90s pop culture in ways that felt both comforting and deeply unsettling. He’s not a household name, but he touches a nerve.

His first major-label album (whatever that really means in 2025), Headlights, isn’t different from his run of Domino albums (2015’s Beach Music to 2022’s God Save the Animals) in kind so much as in degree. “Every couple weeks, I’d have a new song and just start working on it,” he tells Apple Music. “And then, at the end of a couple of years, I guess I had these 12 songs that were good.” The conventional tracks are more straightforward (the early Wilco stomp of “Logan Hotel”), the experiments are both bolder and catchier (the Auto-Tuned hyperpop of “Bounce Boy”). For an artist who can pull deep feeling out of vague stretches of sound, he’s gotten incredibly good at knowing how to use detail and when: Just listen to the accordion that seeps into “June Guitar” or the girls’ chorus that drifts in and out of the alien-abduction/high-school-football story (yes) “Beam Me Up”—touches that feel both unexpected and irreplaceable.

The result is an album that feels less like a collection of indie-rock songs than a dream about collections of indie-rock songs—vivid but patchy, intimate but abstract, emotionally deep but totally indirect. In some ways, he’s just another point on the continuum of artists like Pavement or The Velvet Underground, both of whom managed to balance directness with abstraction, shadow with light. In others, he feels perfectly made for his moment, an enigmatically normal-seeming guy whose gift for melody and cool fragments of sound work as well as background vibes for chill times as hermetic texts left to be parsed by comment-section scholars. There’s a reason his fans latch on so tight: Like a good dream, Alex G points toward mystery.