The musician Mac DeMarco recently bought a rambling, hundred-year-old farmhouse on an island off the coast of British Columbia, deep in the Salish Sea and accessible only via boat. A ferry runs a few times a day from Tsawwassen, near Vancouver; the trip takes about two hours. In late June, DeMarco picked me up from the ferry terminal in a vintage Land Cruiser, its halogen headlights covered by yellow smiley faces. The house came with some eighty olive trees, in varying states of vibrancy or decline. DeMarco had been pruning dead branches, attempting to conjure what’s known as the “open vase” shape, gutting the brittle center growth to promote air circulation. During my three days on the island, he was messing around with the trees more or less constantly, hacking away with clippers or an electric saw, hurling tangles of foliage into a wheelbarrow and dumping its contents in the woods. Sometimes I would lodge my recorder between tree limbs so that we could talk while he worked. There, DeMarco was transforming from a rascally indie-rock icon into a gap-toothed, D.I.Y. frontiersman in disintegrating red Vans.
In 2012, DeMarco released his début EP, “Rock and Roll Night Club,” on Captured Tracks, a Brooklyn-based independent record label known for its deep bench of spacey, lo-fi guitar bands. By the time he put out his second full-length album, “Salad Days,” in 2014, he had been anointed a kind of debauched slacker king. DeMarco’s records were easy, loose, and cool, with echoes of Neil Young and Brian Wilson, if they’d been reared on dank memes, legal weed, and back issues of Thrasher. Pitchfork gave “Salad Days” its Best New Music designation. Prior to the album’s release, the rapper Tyler, the Creator tweeted, “DEAR MAC DEMARCO I LOVE YOU YOU ARE AWESOME.” DeMarco’s followers were passionate and occasionally deranged. (That year, a female fan brought him a pig fetus suspended in a jar of formaldehyde; it was tattooed with a picture of DeMarco as a mermaid.) DeMarco described this period of sudden cultural ascendance—“when things started goin’ wackadoodle”—as disorienting. “The cool kids would come from every city, and they were expecting some kind of sexy famous guy, but I was just a dumbass with a tuque on,” he said.
DeMarco has become only more popular in the past decade. “Chamber of Reflection,” a teetering, synth-driven track from “Salad Days,” is ubiquitous on TikTok, and has been streamed nearly a billion times. DeMarco himself has more than twenty million monthly listeners on Spotify, a remarkable number for a dude who plays dazed, quivery guitar songs about whatever’s on his mind. A TikTok account dedicated to his work has more than eight hundred thousand followers and features videos of DeMarco telling jokes that are sometimes scatological and always absurd. (Picture, say, a pleasingly unhinged-looking DeMarco, hoodie up, placing a fake phone call in which he attempts to order half a million dollars’ worth of poop and pee.) DeMarco’s fans have always been young, but he thinks that they might be getting younger. “There was a point where I kind of understood my audience. Now I have no fucking idea,” he said. “I grew up and they didn’t.”
His new house sits in thrilling but somewhat perilous proximity to the ocean. From the deck, which runs parallel to the shoreline, you can spot orcas, humpback whales, bald eagles (a pair were nesting nearby, atop a gargantuan Douglas fir), otters, and harbor seals, whose speckled heads periodically popped out of the water, peering around for snacks. The property had been sold as is. The guest cottage, where I slept, had a handsome, airy bedroom jutting out over the beach, buttressed by an ad-hoc foundation that resembled something a juiced-up toddler might manufacture from glue and Popsicle sticks. At night, I could hear waves crashing loudly against the western wall. (“It’s comin’ down!” DeMarco joked one morning. “That’s life! ”)
DeMarco and his longtime partner, Kiera McNally, had already fixed up a place in Echo Park, in Los Angeles; he was perhaps overly cognizant of the financial and psychic ferment that accompanies home renovations. Shortly after I arrived, I idly inquired if the property had a well—once you have lived with a well, the health and viability of all wells somehow remain inescapably present in one’s consciousness, a source of endless small talk, like weather, or sports—and his face lit up. “Do you know about wells?” he asked. Freshwater had been on his mind. He’d been monkeying around with an old concrete cistern and a pump, trying to figure out how to irrigate some raised beds. He’d been researching local rules about rainwater collection. The whole situation was making him a little nervous. “This might have been a big mistake,” DeMarco said. But he was eager to be humbled. “I thought I knew everything when I was in my twenties. I want to stay in a place where I’m constantly reminded that I don’t know jack shit, I will never know jack shit, and then someday I’m dead.”
Later this month, DeMarco, who is thirty-five, will release “Guitar,” his tenth record and his first since 2023’s “One Wayne G,” a nine-hour compilation of mostly instrumental demos. DeMarco made “Guitar” at home in L.A. last November, in about two weeks. Just before that, he recorded an entirely different album, “Hear the Music,” which he has played only for McNally. “That’s the only time anyone will hear it, I think,” he said. “With the second one, I played her a bit as I was recording it, but I didn’t tell anyone I worked with for a good four months. I just didn’t want to start the doomsday clock: ‘Well, now, where are the photos?’ It was a really nice experience to have it as a thing I could enjoy for a while.”
“Guitar” is an exceptionally self-contained record. DeMarco played every instrument; produced, engineered, and mixed the songs; shot the album cover and music videos using a tripod; and is releasing it on his own label. He is sometimes modest about his chops—“I can specifically do the little thing that I’ve done that has put me where I am now, but I can pretty much just do the little thing,” he said—but “Guitar” is stunning and deeply idiosyncratic, unlike anything else in his discography. It contains some of his most intimate and sophisticated songwriting. “That’s the advancement,” DeMarco said. (He was more reserved about his musical performance: “The guitar playing sounds like I went back ten years, maybe.”) It’s possible to locate points of comparison—I hear the closeness of Nick Drake’s “Five Leaves Left,” the psychedelic wobble of David Crosby circa “If I Could Only Remember My Name”—but it is hard to tether DeMarco to any particular tradition. “I just don’t feel unsure about it at all,” he said of the album.
DeMarco spoke about the work of songwriting as compulsory, as if he were fulfilling a prophecy. “I think if I don’t do it, I will be punished by the universe,” he said. “When I’m making the songs, I feel satisfaction, and maybe that’s also some kind of addiction—‘You did it again, pal!’—but I think it’s just that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.” He went on, “I can have other hobbies. I can poorly renovate houses or fuck up motorcycle engines. But when I do those things I feel guilty.” That notion—an ineluctable vocational calling—is central to “Punishment,” a new song featuring a swaying guitar line:
On the night of my arrival, DeMarco became briefly preoccupied by a wobbly deck chair. After dinner, he retrieved a saw from the shed, cut a new support beam, and held court for a bit on the utility and character of the Robertson screw, which features a tapered square at its center and was patented by a Canadian tool salesman in 1909. DeMarco eventually got the chair stabilized, though the next day he brought it up as an example of his innate antsiness. “Sometimes all this just feels like a distraction from something,” he said. “I just get a little . . . homed in.”
DeMarco was born in 1990 in British Columbia, and was brought up in Edmonton, Alberta. His birth name, Vernor Winfield MacBriare Smith IV, has an aristocratic jangle, though his mother, Agnes DeMarco, changed it to MacBriare Samuel Lanyon DeMarco after his father left, when Mac was five, and failed to pay child support. “On my dad’s side of the family, there was money, but I just didn’t really know those people,” he said. He believes that being reared by a single mom might have given him a certain scrappiness. He referred to his fellow-Albertans as “utility people.” “In Canada, especially out here, even the tradespeople are, like, ‘I could do it for ya, but framin’ somethin’s not that hard,’ ” he said. “It’s almost like ‘What, you can’t do it yourself?’ I appreciate that.”
DeMarco doesn’t smoke or drink anymore. It’s hard to overstate his prior dedication to these vices. There was a period of time in which it was not unusual for him to empty an entire bottle of Jameson during a set. In 2012, he wrote a woozy, lovesick ballad, “Ode to Viceroy,” about his preferred brand of smokes. (“And oh, don’t let me see you cryin’ / ’Cause oh, honey, I’ll smoke you ’til I’m dyin’,” he sang, his voice notably scratchy.) The photographer Danny Cohen once shot a portrait of DeMarco submerged in a bathtub brimming with cigarettes; he was also photographed under what appeared to be a gentle rain of loosies. (“So you made cigs popular with kids?” the podcaster Adam Friedland once asked him.) Back then, DeMarco’s unabashed libertinism was sort of charming—he is almost preternaturally charismatic—though on occasion it felt depraved. (If your tolerance for tomfoolery, body horror, and the gnarliest corners of the internet is high, you can find a video online of a nude DeMarco onstage, drunk, consummating his relationship with a drumstick.) “I definitely had a pretty severe drinking problem,” he said. “It was bad. I’m glad I’m away from it. Would I be here doing the peaceful thing if I hadn’t gotten sober? Probably not. Would I even be alive? I don’t know. I see photos of myself in 2018 or 2019 and I look near-dead.”
