When we last heard from Alex G, the Philadelphia native was splitting his time between co-writing Halsey songs and composing eerie soundscapes for Jane Schoenbrun’s 2024 leftfield horror film, I Saw The TV Glow. On “Afterlife,” the first song from his upcoming tenth (!) album, and first for RCA, Headlights, he seems to take inspiration from Schoebrun’s paranoid and fantastical worldview as he sings about running between “heaven and a TV screen.” Over a twinkling mandolin, he sings about a “light” that’s “big and bright,” an amorphous energy that seems to both frighten and fascinate him—it’s hard not to think of I Saw The TV Glow and its protagonists, desperately longing for another dimension through hours of late night television.

Alex G has built a discography on slanted rhythms that sound just a note or two away from an uncanny childhood memory, like listening to a music box in a dream. Here, this takes the form of an organ-like synth that hums to life halfway through the song like a wayward rendition of “Walk of Life.” That chiming mandolin and wavering synth, combined with Alex G’s pinched falsetto halfway through, create a sense of artificial brightness, a flood light shining down on one man’s quest for meaning. But Alex G is looking outward: He would rather be “rolling in the tiger grass” or reminiscing about his horse than searching for signals through static.