Everything about AG Cook dinner is exhausting. As a producer of elasticated outre pop his output is as different as it’s frenetic, taking in every part from bass-rattling digital exercises for cultural behemoths comparable to Beyoncé to celestial dreamscapes for underground newcomers, through collaborations with Caroline Polachek and longterm accomplice in crime, Charli XCX. Having initially steered away from solo albums to concentrate on working his divisive but vastly influential label PC Music, Cook dinner’s debut, 2020’s 7G, featured 49 tracks and greater than two hours of music starting from face-melting dance experiments to a lo-fi Sia cowl. Apple, a extra streamlined, however no much less polarising followup arrived a month later.
His onerous drive in some way nonetheless not but full, Cook dinner is now again together with his third album Britpop, a three-part, 24-song opus cut up into Previous, Current and Future sections. As a part of its promotion he’s been busy creating TikToks and launching his personal parody web site Witchfork, billed as “the least trusted voice in music”. “It’s clearly embracing some troll behaviour, which has all the time been a little bit of a thread for me personally,” he laughs.
If this all feels like a variety of work, it makes extra sense while you meet its creator. Throughout our hour-long video name Cook dinner barely stops speaking, with tangents taking in every part from Brexit to S Membership 7’s 00s TV reveals (“I’m very conversant in their model of media and actuality,” he says with real enthusiasm). A easy query like, “The place are you now?” (brief model: he’s in LA, however continuously returns to his house city of London) rapidly unspools right into a prolonged reply about his place within the pop cosmos.
“I work with people who find themselves concerned in pop music at a excessive stage they usually see me as a weirdo who’s able to inject some unusual factor,” he says, his kinetic power making his shoulder-length hair bob about excitedly. “Then I work with my mates who’re doing membership nights they usually see me because the mainstream man who has expertise working with larger artists. So for somebody on that fault line, LA is a extremely fascinating place. I can dip into various things and push my very own perspective.”
That place within the pop cosmos was assured by PC Music. Launched in 2013, the label coated the pop panorama – then dominated by beige stars comparable to Ed Sheeran and Emeli Sandé – in metallic neon. Cook dinner oversaw, and sometimes co-produced, the output of fellow oddballs comparable to Danny L Harle, GFOTY and Hannah Diamond, creating an artificial, saccharine sound that was mixed with stylised visible presentation to match. Unironically referencing so-called “responsible pleasures” of the previous (90s German completely satisfied hardcore outfit Scooter, for instance) whereas giving a style of an unexplored future, its output was influential, serving to to outline and platform the burgeoning style of hyperpop, whereas spreading its tentacles throughout pop through main label acts comparable to Charli XCX and Dua Lipa.
At first, although, individuals had been suspicious. In a world of authenticity and battles over “actual music”, PC Music’s artists had been accused of being pretend. “The UK was very nervous that all of us secretly hated pop music, or that we’d enter the room simply to take the piss,” Cook dinner says. “That was the undertone. Whereas a variety of PC Music and affiliated artists had been let into fascinating locations within the US: precise writing rooms, in with different producers on artist tasks.”
The argument over legitimacy feels much less related in a pop panorama that has been flattened by the rise of streaming, with genres blended collectively and the pop versus indie debate all however nullified. With much less to face in opposition to, maybe it made sense for Cook dinner to shutter PC Music in 2023, its tenth 12 months in operation (it should now be devoted to particular reissues). The announcement was accompanied by a particular 100-minute-long playlist that includes the likes of label signees {and professional} noise retailers EasyFun and Umru. “I noticed it as probably the most PC Music factor to do … To place out an emblematic assertion with outdated and new music and begin planting the seeds of some collaborations with different organisations, even on a museum stage, or an artist stage, or on a gig stage.”
In any case, Cook dinner doesn’t actually have time to be a label head any extra. He’s been closely concerned in Charli XCX’s forthcoming album Brat, persevering with a inventive relationship that began in 2017, plus he’s eager to do extra ad-hoc manufacturing for pop’s largest megastars – even when it means working in some fairly uncommon circumstances. His involvement in Beyoncé’s album Renaissance actually was that: executed remotely, it concerned him being requested to signal an NDA (which finally by no means materialised) after which not figuring out whether or not his contribution to the observe All Up in Your Thoughts would even be used till days earlier than the album’s launch: “It was fascinating, and it led to me being Grammy nominated, however it was actually a window into one thing from a really unusual vantage level.”
The thought for Cook dinner’s new album was formulated whereas he was dwelling in distant Montana through the pandemic together with his American musician girlfriend, Alaska Reid. “I used to be the one British particular person there and having that sense of being a little bit of an alien,” he explains. He turned fascinated with the British references that might nonetheless emerge, from the heraldry on a ranch cowboy belt that nodded to “the Arthurian ideally suited”, to seminal American authors comparable to Steinbeck “tapping into an imagined model of Britain, or England”. Abruptly geographical and historic boundaries had been exploded. “So a manner of digging into what an AG Cook dinner album may very well be was to make use of this as an odd launching pad, discovering this factor that’s barely too loaded.”
In truth, occasions again hand-crafted him query the title. “There’s Brexit, which is clearly fucked, and even when the Queen died I used to be like, ‘OK, is this going to be too loaded, what is that this?’ And not to mention people who find themselves followers of OG Britpop.” (For the report, Cook dinner, who was born in 1990, prefers Blur over Oasis.) However the title was extra about exploring semantics than jingoism. “What I favored about Britpop as a phrase is that either side of it are paradoxical,” he says. “Individuals can’t agree on what pop is, after which there’s clearly Britain, and this fixed ambiguity. You will have the UK, Britain, the British Isles, all of those paradoxical territories and the unusual historical past of all of that. It’s an fascinating phrase to hijack.”
For all of Cook dinner’s mastery in conjuring up aural chaos – new songs comparable to Prismatic and Emerald sound just like the noises you would possibly hear when you spilled Sunny Delight on a circuit board – it’s in Britpop’s Current disc, which primarily options guitar and Cook dinner’s delicate, close-mic vocal, that the wizard behind the scenes is revealed. Its most revealing observe is With out, a young ode to the Grammy-nominated producer Sophie, Cook dinner’s shut buddy and collaborator who died out of the blue in 2021. Sophie shared PC Music’s love for synapse-snapping uber-pop, and fairly than replicate on their friendship through an all-out sonic assault, Cook dinner selected to make one thing akin to their early writing periods, when songs had been created over bare-boned backing tracks.
“With out was me making an attempt to re-map out totally different recollections, making a psychological shrine. It was such an odd and tough time, actually, however these issues are so vital to essentially course of.” He takes a sip of water. “The conclusion was that I used to be finally so fortunate to have spent so a lot time with somebody who would resonate from such a unique perspective. And clearly modified my life. That track was about processing that.” Misplaced in thought, he solutions a query I haven’t requested. “Typically it’s bizarre when a Sophie track comes on in a membership, however a variety of the time I’m similar to: ‘That is superb music to have fun to.’ The music is so highly effective it hasn’t been tarnished by a number of the ache I’ve needed to undergo to even give it some thought once more.”
It’s paradoxical in a really AG Cook dinner manner for there to be a portion of Britpop given over to the thought of “actual” music, AKA a person and his guitar exploring feelings. To the naysayers, the playful digital music, introduced in enjoyable methods, that’s his inventory in commerce is anathema. For Cook dinner rising up, nonetheless, it was the one technique to seize his consideration. An solely little one, he was obsessive about visible media, usually studying instruction manuals, simply “fascinated by complexity and these exploded diagrams”. The one music that actually minimize by got here through visually distinct worlds, comparable to these created by Gorillaz and Daft Punk. Having mastered visible software program he then received into GarageBand, which meant he would usually report and produce his mates’ bands.
“Associates can be speaking about the way it wasn’t like this different music, which is genuine, and has somebody mastering their instrument,” he laughs. “Anybody concerned in PC Music shared the identical gripe about responsible pleasures, authenticity, all that stuff.”
Regardless of all of the collaborations with pop megastars and like-minded oddballs, for now the indefatigable Cook dinner’s focus is only on Britpop and the prolonged world he’s constructing through Witchfork (pattern information story: “Travis’ Fran Healy Says He Impressed David Beckham’s ‘Hoxton Fin’ Mohawk” by Pat Stool); his social media presence (one TikTok options him morphing into trite British signifiers comparable to a crimson bus); and the paintings’s fantastical reimagining of the union jack. It’s all a part of the place he sees pop going: branching off into diametrically opposed lanes of performance on one facet and theatre on the opposite. “An unpredictable album, or one thing that solely exists between albums, or the album turns into the entry however the true model is the marketing campaign itself,” he says, eyes widening on the considered extra mischief. “Issues that create this x and y axis of: ‘What’s going on?!’”
Creating moments of superb confusion? It’s one thing AG Cook dinner is nonetheless exhaustively perfecting.
