Joe Newman from alt-J grins as he shows me a candy tangerine Fender Telecaster. “It looks left-handed but it’s not,” he says over a Zoom call. “It’s just that the video is reversed.” This is a small detail, but an important one. Newman plays guitar and sings lead vocals for the British three-piece. Over Britain’s lockdown he picked up a few guitars, which are now displayed in his “man cave.”
Joined by the band’s keyboardist and vocalist, Gus Unger-Hamilton, we talk about alt-J’s fourth album,, and all of the small details that make its songs so unique. A vague memory became a chorus, an image from a film became a throwaway line, and friends and family lent their voices to help round out the album’s tracks. There are stories behind every lyric, and it becomes clear that for alt-J, it’s cool to care about even the slightest of details.
