As we enter Alex Crossan’s home studio, housed in a modestly sized room at the end of his shady South London garden, we’re politely asked to remove our shoes. This isn’t only to preserve the white carpet, though – the producer tells us that the no-shoes policy is an idea pinched from Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend, who nabbed it from Rick Rubin. By popping off your shoes, the thinking goes, you invite your collaborators to let their guard down, opening up the creative process to a more loose, playful and unrestricted space.
Those three words neatly capture the spirit of demon time, Crossan’s third album as Mura Masa. A no-fucks-given embrace of fun, riot and mischief, the project was conceived during lockdown as a means to combat the introspection and isolation faced during the early days of the pandemic.
“The key word just became fun. That became the driving force behind the sonic palette of the album,” Crossan tells us. “Demon time is that 1am to 6am period, you’re maybe a little bit too drunk, maybe doing something you might regret, but not really – secretly you thought it was quite fun.”
Across 11 tracks of unruly, future-facing pop music, Crossan holds a fractured mirror to our hedonistic, attention-deficient world, and finds it looking back with a mischievous grin. The album zips between more genres than we care to name, inviting a varied cast of collaborators on a giddy, endorphin-rushing tour of his musical influences.
Critics might say it sounds more like a playlist than an album, but that’s missing the point entirely. The record’s born of a slap-happy desire to toss expectations out the window, with every aspect of its creation, from the lyrics and artwork through to the finer details of the production, embodying the mischief and mayhem implicit in its arch-concept: demon time.
Back in Crossan’s studio, we’re beginning to talk through his creative process, and there’s something he’d like us to know. He’s keen to inform us that if there’s one thing he wants people to take away from this interview, it’s that he truly doesn’t know what he’s doing.
The Grammy-winning 26-year-old’s modesty is admirable, if a little misplaced – he’s notched up north of a billion streams and worked with more big names than most producers do in an entire career – but the confession touches on something essential about his approach to music-making.
“There’s a whole approach that does away with the technical snobbery of production, that’s just about output,” he tells us. The practice of music production is beset by protocols to follow, conventions to observe, techniques to learn, menus to dive and manuals to read. But for Crossan, what matters is that what’s coming out of the master bus makes you feel something. In the words of Mura Masa, “don’t overthink it – it’s about having fun”.
Was demon time produced entirely in your home studio?
“It was entirely recorded in that little room back there, excusing some remote vocals that came in from international artists.”
What do you feel has been the most significant change in your approach to music-making
