It’s a tireless cliché for artists to tout new music as their “most personal ever,” as if anything they’d released until then was inferior or meaningless simply because it was made in the past. So it’s somewhat refreshing when Rex Orange County—the British wunderkind behind some of Gen Z’s favorite gooey pop music—says his new album is purposely impersonal.
“It’s removing myself a little bit from it being such a heart-on-my-sleeve thing and such a deep lyrical thing where I’m trying to paint a very specific picture,” the 23-year-old says about his fourth album, Who Cares?, out Friday. “I’m trying to leave it up to people’s interpretation a little bit more.”
That’s a far different approach to the way Rex, whose real name is Alex O’Connor, usually does things. His last album, 2019’s Pony, was a bright blend of hip-hop, jazz, and bedroom pop that dove deep into his psyche with lyrics examining his complicated feelings about newfound fame and phony friends. But everything about the way he made Who Cares? was different. For starters, the album only exists because he had the time to make it following the COVID-forced postponement of his international tour in support of Pony.
“Suddenly I was just back in the countryside with my parents. It was pretty weird, having thought I was going to be away for a year and being mentally prepared for that,” he says about quarantining in his hometown in the U.K. “I was just pretty stressed, I suppose, and just questioning everything.”
The entirety of Who Cares? was made during an unusually productive 12-day period in Amsterdam. Rex and his bass player, Joe MacLaren, road-tripped there in September 2020 with the sole intention of getting away from the U.K. for a bit. While there, they decided to link up with the Dutch musician Benny Sings, Rex’s good friend and occasional collaborator—the two previously struck gold with the sunny streaming smash “Loving Is Easy” in 2017. In just two days, they made four songs together—“Open a Window,” “Keep It Up,” “The Shade,” and “Worth It”—all of which appear on Who Cares?.
Realizing he’d stumbled upon a creative hot streak, Rex returned to Amsterdam in October and kept the magic going, though he certainly wasn’t forcing it, despite how taxing it sounds making 11 songs in 12 days. Rex and MacLaren would head into Benny’s studio around 10 in the morning, work on five or six songs at a time, leave by 7 p.m., go watch a movie like The Godfather or 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then do it all over again the next day.
“We tried not to overthink it at all,” Rex explains of their nonchalant approach in the studio, which extended to his songwriting. In an effort to maintain some shred of privacy in his personal life, any deeper, more autobiographical songs he wrote at the time didn’t make the cut.
“The things that I was writing that were really, really how I felt was actually stuff that will never, probably, be released. It still exists on my hard drive or on my laptop. It just probably won’t come out,” he says. “But [the album] to me is kind of me being able to write without the constraints and worrying about what people would think. I think that was the main thing that would hold me back, and just the fear of it being too connected to my real life. So it’s just navigating that. I’m sure you can imagine, just putting yourself out there, out of choice, and then the tightrope of, ‘I want some privacy.’”
The result is an album that he lovingly describes as “playful,” in that it was more spontaneous and not tied to any type of structure or label-mandated deadline. He also got to release it in his own time, which meant putting it on the back burner for a year and a half while he tried to get himself in a better headspace.
“Initially with the lockdown, I was kind of like, ‘I don’t think I want to put music out.’ I’d heard a few songs that were talking about the pandemic and COVID and I was like, ‘I can’t do that.’ I just was like, ‘I got to disappear for a little minute,’” Rex says when asked why he waited so long to release Who Cares? “So it was partly that, and then partly I was not in a great place, in all honesty. I was just pretty down on myself and not looking after myself. Without going into it, I was just really not in a great zone. And I was like, ‘Well, I definitely just don’t think I’m well enough to be putting this out right now.’”
Hearing that he wasn’t in a great mental place at the time shouldn’t come as a shock to the fans and followers who noticed something was amiss; in October 2020, he cryptically tweeted, “if only i could disappear” and “sometimes i just wish i could be asleep for months honestly.” It was also around that time that he shared he was no longer with his girlfriend of five years, the musician Thea Morgan-Murrell.
“You could probably tell I was struggling, and without needing to even say what was going down in my life, like… you can imagine from starting up, coming up on the internet, basically just being 17 and not really living privately—even though that was my choice—it was a weird thing to get my head around,” he says. “You do this thing and it becomes a job, and it’s really just my love, my hobby, to play instruments, and then it becomes my whole life. It’s been overwhelming, to be honest, over the last five, six years.”
“It’s somewhat more deep-rooted as far as the story of that time,” he adds. “And I think there’s a time and place for that, but I’m living through it. At that point I was like, ‘I don’t need to make this public. That’s the reason why this has been difficult, so I’m not going to.’ So I came off the internet, I’ve not really been on my phone. I just needed to look after myself.”
What the new album may lack in idiomatic lyrics, it makes up for with Rex’s reliably stunning musicianship; together, he and Benny produced, arranged, and co-wrote every song on the album. A multi-instrumentalist since he was a kid, Rex continues his penchant for mixing vintage and contemporary sounds on Who Cares?, most awesomely on “Worth It,” which opens with regal-sounding string orchestration before a drum beat kicks in and he launches into a scattered jumble of thoughts: “It’s not worth it anymore / I feel insane / And I’m not sure / Why things change / What’s worth it anymore?” Similarly uncomplicated is “Making Time,” which sounds like Gen Z’s version of a Sinatra standard, clocking in under two minutes and consisting of just one lyric. “‘Making time to see you, you make things fine, we’re safe inside, don’t wait up. I’m OK, I’m OK.’ That is the whole lyric, the whole song. You look up the lyrics and it’s just four lines. I just love it,” Rex says.
Rex Orange County performing in January 2020.
Robyn BeckAnd yet, for all its broadness, there are moments of seeming specificity on the album, like “The Shade,” on which he sings about going to Amsterdam “just to give you some space”—though he insists that one “wasn’t directly linked” to anything happening in his life at the time. Then there’s “7am,” which finds Rex desperate to prove himself and repeatedly musing, “What if I’m not cut out for this and I want to call it quits?”—a feeling he’s had to contend with over the past few years as he’s grown from an unknown Soundcloud artist to one boasting 12 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
“I often have this thing of wanting to just be like, ‘I’m going to quit. I’m just going to stop, fuck all,’” Rex says. “But it’s like a ‘I don’t really want to quit’ kind of a thing; it’s the last thing I’d ever want to do, because when you care, you only wake up every day wanting to do it. I wake up every day trying to get it right and if I get it wrong, it’s kind of just beating myself up.”
Perhaps that’s what makes the addition of Tyler, the Creator, such a fresh-sounding voice of reason on the album; he’s like the older, wiser sage in Rex’s life. The rapper lends a verse to “Open a Window,” marking a long-awaited reunion for the two friends after Rex appeared on Tyler’s Flower Boy cut “Boredom” back in 2017.
“That’s my guy. He is definitely someone who doesn’t mind what people think so much. He believes in himself a lot and is very true to himself, has a lot of conviction in what he does,” Rex says about Tyler, who comes in blazing on “Open a Window” with a lyric that pretty much encapsulates everything people love about him: “I’m Tyler, I’m honest / I never bite my tongue, it’s for the better, I promise.”
“He killed it. That line made me smile so much. I was like, ‘That’s really him to a T,’” Rex says. “And it’s funny because that song is about me being like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be in this situation, I want to break out, just get out whichever way I can.’ And he’s like, ‘Man, fuck that shit.’ He’s kind of giving me advice, like, ‘Just go, why are you even waiting around? I never don’t say how I feel, I got to say how I feel.’”
That’s an ethos Rex is still striving for, and it bleeds into the very concept and even the title of the album, which is a double entendre of sorts. On the one hand, “Who cares?” can be read as a flippant, shrug-off response to critics and haters. On the other hand, it’s a question Rex genuinely wants the answer to—he cares deeply about his music, and he wants to know if it resonates with anyone. He cares, but he doesn’t want to—one of the most universal contradictions a person can feel.
“I’ve lived heavily on both sides of the phrase, where on one hand it’s like, ‘Throw it away, I don’t care, who cares?’ I’ve definitely said that a lot, when I really do care,” he says. “And the opposite is the question mark—the question of who cares about me? I want to know. I wouldn’t be putting music out if I didn’t want to know.”
When asked how he contends with all those dueling emotions, he answers casually and aspirationally, evoking the hook of his Who Cares? album opener, “Keep It Up”: “Keep it up and go on / You’re only holding out for what you want / You no longer owe the strangers / It’s enough, keep it up.”
“I think I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I cannot—and truly cannot, and will keep trying until I cannot—control what people think of me,” he says. “I can only do what I love to do, put myself out how I choose to, and see how it goes. We don’t have very much time on the Earth, you know what I mean?”
