from urgency to intention: bartees strange’s next chapter
three years after farm to table, bartees strange returns with a record that favors depth over urgency, building a world where funk, indie rock, grief, and joy all collide.
A few years ago, I interviewed Bartees Strange for NME around the release of his breakthrough second record, Farm to Table. That album came together quickly—buzzing with urgency, ambition, and raw momentum. When we spoke back then, I remember him being wide-eyed and fired up. It was a snapshot of an artist sprinting toward something.
Now, with Horror, he’s moving differently. This third record is slower, deeper, more intentional. It doesn’t chase anything—it sits with things. It makes room for complexity: grief, reflection, experimentation, joy. And it draws from a wide-open palette.. It’s expansive without being overblown—just lived-in and alive.
When we reconnected recently, Bartees was in a very different place creatively. We talked about how Horror was made over three years, how collaboration shaped the album’s emotional arc, and why he wants to keep both speed and slowness on the table moving forward. We also got into questions of visibility—what it means to be a Black artist in rock and alt spaces, and how the current wave of Black alternative artists might be clearing a path for someone even bolder to come next.
The conversation is below—and it’s one of those ones that stuck with me for a while after we spoke.
Bartees Strange’s new album Horror doesn’t burst into the room. It unfolds. It steps out from the dark with confidence, not chaos—less a scream, more a revelation. Where his last record, Farm to Table, burned hot and fast, Horror feels deliberate, layered, and—crucially—lived in.
When we speak, I tell him exactly that. “The second record felt urgent,” I say, “but this one feels like something that’s been nurtured—like a newborn that’s been raised and watered slowly.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly how it feels,” he says. “I made what I wanted to make. I love Farm to Table, but I made it so fast that I didn’t get to really get my hands on it. Thank God the songs were good, because they could have gone either way. It was that quick.”
He laughs a little, but the point stands. The new record was given time—and in turn, it gave back.
“But with Horror, I had time. Over those three years, I met so many interesting people who became part of the process—like Jack Antonoff, Lawrence Rothman, Steph Marziano. That wouldn’t have happened if I made it in eight weeks. It was a good lesson.”
There’s a sense that Horror benefited from this longer gestation—not just musically, but philosophically. It’s an album that seems to believe in world-building, in patience, in letting creative momentum ebb and flow rather than catching a wave and riding it ‘til burnout.
So, has that changed the way he wants to work going forward?
“I want both on the table,” he says. “There’s stuff I want to make quickly, where it’s good if it’s done in a week. And other projects where I want to build a whole world again, and that’ll take a couple years. I think the next thing I do might be a split with another artist—three songs each, written and recorded in 10 days. Or maybe a stripped-back record—just guitar and voice, knocked out in three days. But I also want to keep making those bigger, intentional records too. They all serve different purposes, and they’re all important in their own way.”
This appetite for extremes—fast and slow, raw and orchestrated—threads through Horror itself. The album moves like a mixtape of memory and intention, sliding between genres with elegance and friction. It makes room for Parliament-Funkadelic grooves, Neil Young melancholy, Sheryl Crow shimmer, and the scorched edges of indie rock, without ever collapsing under its own weight.
I ask how he brings such a wide array of influences into a record while still sounding entirely like himself.
“That’s a tough one. I feel like listening to music is my music theory. I don’t know the formal stuff, but I hear it. When I’m writing, I’m always referencing things I’ve heard—like, ‘This chord change is from a Big Thief song, which reminds me of a Fleetwood Mac move, which reminds me of something from The Beatles.’ I love connecting things.”
“For this record, I was obsessed with the late ’60s to early ’80s—Parliament, Isley Brothers, Rick James, Bootsy Collins—but also Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young. People think of those artists as separate, but they all knew each other and influenced each other. Like, Rick James played in Neil Young’s band! There were no real borders back then. People just made great music.”
“I wanted to blur those lines. That’s what I was doing with the first six tracks—starting with those big, Funkadelic-type grooves, moving into more Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young territory, and then into something more modern. Kind of a musical journey through rock, ending in tracks like ‘Backseat,’ which is part Sheryl Crow pop, part grimy indie rock. It all just lives together in my brain, and if it feels right, I run with it. If it doesn’t work, I trash it.”
This blur—the collapse of genre, the refusal to sit still—feels essential to Bartees’ artistry. But so does accessibility. Horror may be expansive, but it’s not obtuse. It wants to connect. It wants to reach the kid who sees themselves in something a little left-of-centre, a little too much of everything.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” he says when I ask if he shuts off music while making his own. “I thought I was bad at music too. My mom’s an opera singer, and she put me in all kinds of musical stuff—I was always the worst one. But guitar spoke to me. That was my way in.”
That guitar has become his calling card. But it’s collaboration, too, that brings new textures to the sound. Like his recent work with Jack Antonoff.
“It was just a playground,” he says. “He’d be working on stuff for me, and I’d be doing things for him. Very casual. I’d say, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ and he’d be like, ‘Cool, come over.’ No managers, no payment gates—just: Let’s make something cool. That’s part of what makes him brilliant.”
That energy is starting to shape his live shows, too.
“Definitely. I’m investing more in production, trying to create a character for the live shows. I’m still figuring out the lineup—whether that’s four or six people, multiple guitarists or keyboardists. We’ve been testing things out on this run, and I feel like I’m getting somewhere. Just enough time to tweak before the April shows.”
Near the end of our conversation, I bring up his Tiny Desk performance—part of NPR’s Black History Month programming. I tell him how powerful it felt to see a Black artist in alt-rock spaces given that kind of platform. He nods.
“Thank you. Yeah, I think about that a lot. I look at people like Rachel Chinouriri, Yves Tumor, —we’re a small but mighty club. I feel like we’re part of a movement. It’s landing, but I think someone coming after us is going to blow it wide open.
“We all want it to be us—and maybe it will be one of us—but I get the sense that there’s a kid out there watching us now, and they’re going to be the next Prince or Jada Pinkett Smith fronting a band. And I can’t wait to see that happen.
“Like, when I was younger, I was watching TV on the Radio, Bloc Party, Santigold—I wanted to be them. Now, hopefully someone’s watching us, feeling the same thing. It just gets bigger every time.”
There’s something beautiful in that image: influence not as ownership, but as invitation. Horror doesn’t demand a legacy. It builds scaffolding for someone else to climb.
When I ask how he imagines relating to the record in five or ten years, he pauses.
“Every time I get distance from a record, I realize what I was actually trying to say. Right now, I look at Horror and go, ‘Wow, I was really working through some stuff.’ But I think in a few years, I’ll see it more clearly—understand what was coming out of me. Right now, I’m still too close. It’s like staring at the ocean from an inch away.”
From here, Horror looks vast. But it also looks like a mirror—held up
not just to Bartees Strange, but to all of us navigating influence, identity, and the deep, messy thrill of making something new.
