God Save the Animals

It’s his most sonically consistent record, with beautiful textural piano underlying almost every song.

Alex G is a genius at crafting intimately familiar feelings while injecting off-kilter miscues that satisfy the oddball compulsions living in our heads. The level of restraint routinely becomes unbalanced in an instant, yet the results are more reassuring than anxiety-inducing.

God Save the Animals feels like a culmination of Alex G’s work to date, encompassing the murkiness of his early songs, the rootsiness of 2017’s Rocket, and the eclecticism of 2019’s House of Sugar. It’s an emotionally and spiritually rewarding effort.

Though it feels glued together by the seams, God Save The Animals, like the best Alex G efforts, eventually reveals an almost impossible cohesiveness – a slightly off-kilter haze where a smouldering heart shines for others to lean into.

Alex G’s ability to widen the aperture of his work with each album, and not alienate his audience, speaks to just how much he’s able to pinpoint and define what stands out within his work. God Save the Animals is just the latest reminder that, as his tastes expand, so too does his sonic palate.

While most tracks on God Save the Animals are simply constructed, often built around either a rambling piano or twangy plucked melody, there are stunning moments of sudden sonic shifts and digital surprises.

God Save the Animals’ production approaches are understated compared to those employed in previous work yet still precisely rendered. What stand out – prominently and unabashedly – are Alex’s impeccably crafted and irresistibly delivered songs.

On his latest album, God Save the Animals, he wrings strange beauty from our non-human companions, grappling with innocence and its discontents through their saucer-eyed stares. God Save the Animals stands out for its moments of sharp lyrical simplicity.

Alex G’s ninth full-length album, is easily one of his most cohesive works to date.

For the most part it’s a rich and deftly arranged work, and though there’s a warmth that can sometimes border on cloying, he cuts through with chaos and levity.

On God Save The Animals, Alex G creates his best music to date. The textures are as complex as its lyrical content and it’s all strung together beautifully through intricate piano sections. Throughout this album, we see calculated risks pay off in a major way to create a colorful yet challenging album and one that requires multiple listens to fully understand Alex G’s end goal.

An album that, if challenging, successfully mixes religious motifs with a balance of tactile, earthbound textures and hypnotically dreamy, alien atmospheres.

It’s a testament to his talents that he can produce an album that encapsulates his weird and beautiful world, which is full of more questions than answers.

The album maintains its hallucinatory aura throughout; it’s a dazzling aural anime from a wildly original artist. [Oct 2022, p.29]

While the singles may be his most commercially appealing to date, he never once loses integrity or his aural signature as an artist.