Rex Orange County

Rex Orange County has always made music about growing up: His winsome, richly-produced indie-pop songs tap into the richness of first love and first heartbreak with wise beyond his years poeticism and a keen understanding of the universal human condition. Across his four beloved studio albums, Alex O’Connor has continued to refine that vision, zeroing in on the minutiae of love with an unfathomable sense of craft and finesse.

But here’s the thing about staking your career on writing youthful love songs: At some point, you have to grow up. On his fifth album The Alexander Technique, 26-year-old O’Connor turns his gaze inward, interrogating the pain and mental health issues that have been plaguing him beneath the surface since he achieved global success as a teenager.

Stripping back his sound to a skeletal mixture of stream-of-consciousness R&B and resonant indie-folk, while retaining the orchestral lushness that’s become his trademark, The Alexander Technique marks the beginning of Act Two of O’Connor’s career: a new chapter on which he lays everything bare, no matter how painful that might be. “The Alexander Technique is very much a look into my own brain and experiences over the last few years – it’s almost a diary,” he says.

The Alexander Technique arrives after a decade-long career that’s seen O’Connor become one of the most lauded musicians of his generation. Breaking through as a teenager with the self-produced Bcos U Will Never B Free, O’Connor was quickly noticed by generational rapper Tyler, The Creator, who has since become one of O’Connor’s closest collaborators. In the years since, he’s amassed a handful of Billboard 200 hits and continued to establish himself as one of his generation’s most beloved songwriters. In 2023 alone, O’Connor played a number of arena headline shows and was once again selected by Tyler to perform at his long-running Camp Flog Gnaw festival, this time in the penultimate slot on the main stage; in 2022, he sold over 220,000 tickets in North America and played at iconic venues such as the Hollywood Bowl and Red
Rocks.

Produced at various studios around the world with collaborators Teo Halm (Rosalía, SZA, Beyoncé) and Jim Reed, the latter a longtime member of O’Connor’s touring band, work on The Alexander Technique began in 2020 and extended until early 2024, marking the longest O’Connor has ever worked on a project. The album’s sole feature comes from lauded electronic luminary James Blake on “Look Me In The Eyes,” a heartbreaking late-album moment built around a freestyle idea that Blake had in the studio one evening. After sitting around and talking about life and the industry for hours, Blake was about to leave before O’Connor asked him to quickly try to lay an idea down; within 20 minutes, he had broken O’Connor’s heart with the foundations of “Look Me In The Eyes.” “What you hear is what he did,” says O’Connor. “It was
ridiculous – I worked on it that evening til 7am, trying to record the perfect harmonies to match what James did.”

O’Connor is one of Gen Z’s defining artists, with songs that cut to the heart of everyday life, tapping into profound lyricism and rich musical instinct in the process. The Alexander Technique, though, goes further than ever before in O’Connor’s quest to fully understand the human heart, putting himself under the microscope in the name of his art.