Interview by Matteo Pini
Portrait by Syriah Babu

MP You’ve described Café Paradiso as an album about enjoying your own company, which is interesting given how erotically charged it is.

MB I’m at my best when I’m by myself, which is a symptom of the lifestyle I’ve maintained across my career. I’m in airports a lot; I don’t have a nine-to-five schedule; when I come to a city, I’m often alone, and tend to have a lot of free time. There’s a certain peace in going to a dive bar at 4 in the afternoon, having a drink by myself and listening to an album through headphones. That was the inspiration behind Café Paradiso as an imagined place. These are spaces I’ve grown up in that I go to when I need privacy but also want to feel like part of society.

MP How does that pertain to your relationship with New York, where you used to live and where you recorded the album with your regular collaborator FaltyDL?

MB I always say New York is where I matured. It’s a very difficult place for a young artist without family support, even if it was much friendlier 20 years ago. I had real growing pains and experienced a lot of trauma there, but I’ve carried the life lessons I learned there everywhere else I’ve lived. I decided to record in New York because my executive producer and overall genius partner-in-music FaltyDL had just had two children: I hadn’t spent more than three weeks there in years. I ended up subletting from Brian deGraw from [cult band] Gang Gang Dance, who has a place in the East Village. All my friends still in New York live in this East Village-Lower East Side-Chinatown trifecta, so I was suddenly in the middle of it again. There’s a level of osmosis that happens when a place seeps into the music: months after I made it, I was like, man, this is such a New York record.

MP Did you feel like you needed to leave the city to hear it properly again?

MB Oh my God, yes! I would never live in New York again. People have been saying New York has been dying forever but I think the dream is finally dead. If you haven’t already lived there for the last 10 to 15 years, you have to be wealthy to survive. I’m going to say something really controversial: I understand the sociopolitical dynamics and logistics of why gentrification is evil, but as someone who’s lived in so many places, there’s a certain amount of social geography that will happen to a place no matter what. I don’t mean that in a nihilistic sense of “we can’t stop corporations”, but so many structural factors go into what changes a place. I see New York through a nostalgic lens, but it’s basically impossible to live there as an artist now. It’s becoming like San Francisco or Shanghai, morphing in a way that’s beyond my understanding.

MP You’ve called this a “post-rumspringa” record. I found that interesting because it implies a return as much as a departure. What are you coming back to?

MB The record has two energetic threads. Lyrically, I’m trying to craft very interior worlds and motifs; what makes a really good pop song is taking high-energy production and melding it with very intimate lyrics. The other thread is that I wanted to make a festival record, one you know is gonna be great on stage. Even as the songs vary in genre, they have a timeless quality, as if they could come from the same compilation CD. A lot of my earlier work was very concept-driven: looking back, I see my art school-dropout brain being like, “this is a concept album”. Now that I’ve matured in my songwriting, I don’t put parameters on myself. At one point, I thought this album would have some completely ambient tracks: I’d come to FaltyDL with nature samples and say, “I need to figure out how to make a 90s spa-wave version of hip-hop.” I have so much more fun making music than I did when I was younger because I don’t have anything to prove anymore.

MP The record is unapologetically horny, but its sexuality is swoony and romantic as well as confrontational.

MB I didn’t know this record was gonna be so lovey-dovey until we were doing the final song selection. Even though you can never dictate when a relationship will happen, you should be at your best, financially and physically, etc. It’s important to feel good in yourself because if you don’t, all that shit ends up projected onto the other person. After the pandemic, I decided to take a break from music and go to graduate art school in Switzerland because I was burnt out and needed a breather. Taking that time to work on myself was some real human shit I needed to do, but it did upend my life a bit. When I was recording the record in 2024 and 2025, I was looking for harmony again. I was yearning for affection, for a love affair, but I knew these things wouldn’t manifest until I was grounded in my own life. That sense of desiring permeated the album.

MP That yearning extends to the album’s visual world, like the video Matt Lambert directed for “Butt Sex”, which is both impish and erotic.

MB Visuals have always been so important to my work, but they’re even more important now that we’re in this attention economy. I don’t think artists have to compete with content creators – a musician isn’t competing with a fitness influencer, people aren’t that dumb! When I think about how things shift in culture, I never begrudge the current state of affairs. I like to make music of the time and think it’s important to sprinkle in whatever the current mise-en-scène is. When I think back to writing tracks like “Your Feminism Is Not My Feminism” or a song like “Carry On”, where the lyrics read, “Black and Gay, I wonder if they’ll ever claim us / HIV, I have HIV, can I still be famous?”, it mirrors the mainstreaming of intersectionality and even virtue signalling that was happening at the time. One reason I don’t rap much anymore is that I rap in a style that feels nostalgic now: I don’t want to make records that sound like old rap records, but I’m not going to change my style to sound like a 21-year-old. I make more universal and interesting music, breaking free from the hip-hop paradigm. On “Little Feet” from this album, I thought I finally sounded sexy! It’s something I’ve been experimenting with for years, and I finally got there. Now I’m making music that mirrors what I really love because I’m confident enough to do it, and it feels so great. .