Alex Cameron’s music could easily pass as audiobooks someone had fun putting background music to, and his sophomore release Forced Witness, out now via Secretly Canadian, is no exception.
Eighties pop and classic rock pave the way through the new album, filled with sax solos and synth blasts. Inspired by writers including George Saunders and Kurt Vonnegut, the Australian songwriter and his business partner Roy Molloy—with a little help from friends like Angel Olsen, Brandon Flowers, Jonathan Rado, and Kirin J Callinan—delves in to autofiction, crafting ten tracks into portraits of dysfunctional alpha males asserting their toxic masculinity in all the wrong possible ways.
“It was a discussion I had to have with myself and with the close people around me about the responsibilities I had to accept about being an artist that was gonna broadcast a character that had those ideologies,” Cameron told Flavorwire’s Moze Halperin. He continued:
Where does one draw the line when you as a person believe in progress, but as a writer feel like you need to focus on people who would challenge that, who would ask us to regress? So I feel challenged… it’s about people that, if I could flick a button, ideally wouldn’t exist. But unfortunately they do; we’ve been confronted by them in Australia, and in our travels. I felt it’d be more irresponsible as a straight white man to not represent that, to not address it, to not challenge it in a song.
Watch three videos from the new album below!
