Alex G, the moniker for Alex Giannascoli, has cultivated an aura of mystique throughout his decade-long music career. Known for his playfully distorted and genre-bending approach to songwriting, the 29-year-old artist frequently adopts different personas and vocal manipulations, leading to questions about his identity, including whether Alex G is transgender. While there is no public information confirming Alex G is transgender, the speculation itself speaks volumes about his artistic persona and the way he challenges conventions through his music.
Giannascoli’s music often features character studies, embodying insecure teenage girls, children, and various fictional figures. This shape-shifting quality extends to his vocals, which he contorts through pitch-shifting and vocoding, creating childlike choruses and diverse personas reminiscent of helium-infused Peanuts characters. This stylistic choice, exemplified in tracks like “Bad Man” with its cartoonish country accent, contributes to the perception of Alex G as an ageless and somewhat enigmatic narrator.
Critics have often described Giannascoli as opaque, attributing this to his constantly mutating musical approach and reluctance to reveal biographical details or clear meanings in his songs. While his diverse soundscapes have garnered critical acclaim, they have also, at times, created a barrier to a singular, easily definable artistic statement. However, his latest album, God Save the Animals, marks a turning point. Here, his disjointed style gains new power, as Giannascoli channels his wide-ranging musical quirks with a newfound focus, creating a cohesive yet complex exploration of morality.
God Save the Animals delves into themes of right and wrong, beauty and noise, infused with religious undertones and a clarity achieved through a refined engineering approach. This album showcases an artist in a state of artistic and professional maturation, using its sonic diversity to mirror the unease of navigating life’s uncertain path. The album opens with “After All,” where Giannascoli’s voice, interwoven with Jessica Lea Mayfield’s, is pitched into an ethereal warble, singing, “People come and people go away, Yeah but God with me he stayed.” Religious references permeate the album, almost resembling Alex G-penned worship songs, as heard in “S.D.O.S.” with the line, “God is my designer, Jesus is my lawyer,” delivered through electronic vocal effects. Even on the seemingly simple country track “Miracles,” he wistfully sings of “better pills than ecstasy, they’re miracles and crosses,” circling themes of judgment, forgiveness, and the quest for righteousness.
The album’s pious tones are not mere gimmicks, despite the grungy and playful nature of the “Blessing” video. Throughout God Save the Animals, Giannascoli translates the weight of his thoughts into the music’s structure. He employs manipulated vocals to underscore unspoken sentiments, creating a confessional-like atmosphere. In “Runner,” he repeats “I have done a couple bad things,” his voice warping against the song’s steady rhythm before culminating in a scream. Similarly, in “Mission,” a shaken, yelling backup vocal contrasts with the stoic chorus, creating a sense of internal conflict. Even comforting phrases are delivered with a dark, hoarse whisper, suggesting self-doubt. The juxtaposition of tracks like the gothic “Blessing” and the folksy “Early Morning Waiting” highlights this duality, abruptly shifting moods and challenging listener expectations.
Despite these sonic quirks, God Save the Animals presents a clearer and more sonically refined Alex G than ever before. For this record, Giannascoli collaborated with multiple engineers to achieve optimal recording quality, a departure from his traditionally home-recorded style. This enhanced clarity is evident in tracks like “Early Morning Waiting,” with its elegant string section, and the crisp production of “Runner.” While Giannascoli’s vocals, often multi-tracked and layered, have drawn Elliott Smith comparisons, on this album, they are surprisingly bare in many instances. The cartoonish persona of “Bad Man” is replaced by a more earnest voice, as heard in “Miracles,” singing of “beautiful sunsets on lost and lonely days.” The music often mirrors the seriousness of the themes explored, even without being overtly confessional. Lyrics that address the futility of songwriting, such as “Hey, look in the mirror, ain’t gonna right your wrong with a stupid love song,” sung by his girlfriend Molly Germer in “Mission,” invite deeper interpretation.
This shift in technique and the resulting professional sound mark a significant step in Giannascoli’s evolution. His early work emerged from the bedroom recording scene of the 2010s, lending his music a lo-fi charm. However, his journey from a Bandcamp curiosity to a Domino Records artist with millions of streams and collaborations with Frank Ocean has involved a gradual opening up of his creative process. Starting with 2014’s DSU, he began professional mastering, progressively refining his sound while retaining his eccentricities. God Save the Animals pushes this evolution further, showcasing a more intense and mature sound. The album’s exploration of morality and judgment is fittingly mirrored by its more illuminating production, matching its multi-voiced perspectives with a diverse studio approach.
The beauty of God Save the Animals lies in its contrasting elements – a song like “No Bitterness” evolving from acoustic delicacy to hyperpop noise, or sincere sentiments twisted by vocal manipulation, reflecting shame and self-doubt. These tensions, described as “half of love, half of death” in “Early Morning Waiting,” define the album. Across its 13 tracks, God Save the Animals focuses Alex G’s signature magic tricks, capturing the sound of a self balancing between sin and absolution. While the question “Is Alex G Transgender” remains unanswered in a biographical sense, his artistic exploration of identity, persona, and vocal manipulation provides a rich and complex tapestry that resonates deeply with listeners, regardless of his personal identity. His music itself becomes a space where identity is fluid and multifaceted, much like the questions surrounding his own persona.
