Albee Layer is All Worked Up

If you take a few moments to scroll through Albee Layer’s Instagram account, you’ll see plenty of photos and videos of the Maui native sticking airs that hurt your knees just to watch. Gravity-defying double oops, backside 720s, full-rotation Indy grabs and just about every other aerial persuasion you can think of abound. Ever since he upped the aerial ante with his winning video part in Taylor Steele’s 2012 “Innersection” contest, Layer’s been at the forefront of progression in surfing, steadily dropping edits featuring some of most radical maneuvers ever done on a surfboard.

But if you continue scrolling through Layer’s Instagram feed, you’ll see posts of a different kind—screenshots of rabble-rousing opinions he’s written down on his iPhone Notes app about how surfing is “so far behind snowboarding” in terms of aerial maneuvers, how the WSL needs to improve their scoring system to foster progression or how ‘CT judges “get way too excited about backside snaps.”

While his divisive views on surfing may have earned him a reputation as a troublemaker, Layer isn’t pressing buttons just to press them. If you ask Layer, he’ll tell you that his motivation is simple—he just loves surfing, and will do and say whatever he thinks it will take to make surfing’s future more