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It's late October when I walk up to Mac DeMarco's home studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where the creaky iron gate outside never seems to shut all the way. The 23-year-old comes to the door looking and sounding like he's been up all night—eyes drooping, not really smiling. He's got a mustache and scraggly facial hair in that nebulous zone between “five o'clock shadow” and “actual beard.” He's wearing the hat he wears all the time, the one with the patch on it.

He points to a cluttered box of a room on the left, says it's his, and tells me to make myself at home while he takes a piss. In the hallway, there's a baby doll with demon wings hanging from the ceiling, twine tied around its torso. There's just enough clearance for his door to open, though sizable chunks of wood usually chip off whenever you close it. His room is maybe 15 feet long, and rumpled-up clothes and a five-piece drum kit take up at least 90% of the walkable floor space. He lives here with his girlfriend. There aren't any windows.

A month previous, after returning to New York from an extensive tour behind his breakout album 2, which included some arena gigs opening for Phoenix, DeMarco went to the store to stock up on everything he needed so he wouldn't have to leave this room. “And I pretty much haven't,” he says. Fruit flies hover around a full Viceroy-brand ashtray. For the past few weeks, he's been toiling on his third solo record in this space, recording every instrument on the record while chain smoking about two packs a day with the door closed. “In Canada, we call this ‘the Indian hot box,’” says DeMarco, who grew up in Edmonton. After four days of hanging out in the unventilated rectangle, my eye started twitching persistently; he calls this “smoker's eye.”

To understand why this grubby, gap-toothed kid has seized a strong following over the last few years, consider the other festival-friendly indie rock outfits currently in his sphere. In a heap of artists who take their craft very seriously, here's a guy with a penchant for public nudity, shameless drunkenness, and slovenly classic-rock covers peppered with the shouted words “SUCK MY DICK!” So while some find his behavior repugnant, others are enthralled with his youthful abandon; either way, within the often faceless world of modern guitar rock, DeMarco demands attention by not giving a fuck. It's no wonder he recently found a kindred spirit in shit-stirrer extraordinaire Tyler, the Creator, who tweeted: “DEAR MAC DEMARCO I LOVE YOU YOU ARE AWESOME.”

But DeMarco's not just some volatile loose cannon. There's a warmth and approachability about him; he recently covered Jonathan Richman live, and he talks about Steely Dan records with authority. His home-recorded love songs—near yacht rock-ian in their smoothness—contain widely universal sentiments. They're feel-good affairs performed with a deep-voiced croon and a warbly guitar tone that's distinctly his own. He's telling stories with a smile, crafting breezy songs that sound good at outdoor stages.

In person, he smiles and makes you feel like you're in on his jokes, however bizarre or disgusting they may be. He's the friend who actively looks for the party, drinks way too much when he gets there, and is eventually found passed out in the closet. He's an auteur with a lampshade on his head. A punk kid with moon eyes. An unwashed chain-smoker from the Canadian flatlands who keeps coughing between sentences.

It's time to record. DeMarco lights a cigarette, grabs his junky electric guitar—which is tricked-out with a pickguard made from house siding and a Pabst bottlecap around the input jack—and finds the right place to stand so the amp doesn't buzz. When he starts playing, he wiggles his head around in a circle and bobs his knees. Sometimes, his entire body heaves, on the beat, from side to side. When he plays back the tape, he tells me to note that the song's bassline is “dirty as shit.”

DeMarco's got just a few more days to finish three more songs for what will be his most scrutinized album yet, Salad Days. When he talks about what he's got left to do, he runs his hand through his hair (which then sticks directly up), his eyes glaze over a little, and he sounds exhausted. His slumped-over presence is a sharp contrast to his public persona, though he's not humorless. When he gets excited about a song he's just recorded, he'll turn the volume up pretty loud and yell something like “niiiiice baby!” in a sort of off-brand Jim Carrey caricature.

Mostly, though, he's focused and finally winding down from almost constantly being “on.” Earlier in October, he sat on the floor of this room, a pillow beneath his ass, his keyboard in front of him, and wrote both the music and lyrics to the wary new track “Passing Out Pieces”. Key lyric: “I'm passing out pieces of me, don't you know nothing comes free?” Following a year and a half of touring and press, DeMarco says he felt “fuckin' bummed out.” He and his band were outspokenly sick of their own set; their medley of jokey covers—including “Takin' Care of Business”, “Enter Sandman”, and Limp Bizkit's “Break Stuff”—became a chore.

He sounds beleaguered as he talks about his fanbase, which ballooned over the past year. Before 2 came out in late 2012, DeMarco was playing sparsely-attended shows in 200-person capacity rooms, but he just sold-out an upcoming set at Manhattan's Webster Hall—that's 1,400 tickets. “I don't have resentment towards the fans,” he's quick to note, before admitting they've “kind of scared the shit out of me.”

“I feel sort of weathered and beat down and grown up all of a sudden,” DeMarco says. “I've always had some kind of plateau that I wanted to reach, and now I just can't see the next one.” For Salad Days, he's imposed a firm restriction on himself as a songwriter: No more songs “about absolutely nothing” with ambiguous lyrics. He's concerned that his new songs, which he describes as negative, may put off some fans.

“But I need to get this shit out, you know?”

“He's always been a kook since he was a little boy,” says Agnes DeMarco, Mac's mom. “When I took him skating for the first time, he spun like a whirling dervish, fell down, and then got right back up to spin again.” For his part, Mac recounts a day when he and a neighborhood kid named Norman poured gasoline into flower beds and lit them on fire, then made molotov cocktails and whipped them into oncoming traffic. (Agnes doesn't remember that.)

DeMarco's 21-year-old brother Hank, who's currently studying ballet in Calgary, says that whenever he took a bath between the ages of 8 and 17, Mac would unhinge the lock and come into the bathroom to annoy him. When I speak to DeMarco's friends, they struggle to offer specific childhood stories—there are just too many. Still, Alex Calder, a member of DeMarco's old band Makeout Videotape, can't help but recall one of the many times when he woke up with Mac's bare penis resting on his face.

When DeMarco was in high school, he and his friends would hang out in Agnes' garage and play blues jams, which eventually led to his first joke bands. There was the Gories-style shit-fi group the Meat Cleavers, who nabbed a few gigs after sending local promoters threatening emails: “Give us a fuckin' show or we'll come down there and beat the fuckin' shit out of you.” Thinking back to the crowds at those Meat Cleavers shows, Calder says, “I don't know if anyone got the joke.”

Then came the Sound of Love, a smooth R&B band that had DeMarco singing songs about girls from his school, like “Queen of the Courts” (about a girl who played tennis) and “Chinese Takeout Lady” (about an Asian girl Mac had a crush on). He pissed off a lot of girls with that band.

After completing two EPs and an album with Makeout Videotape, DeMarco started making music under his own name. Actually, “Mac DeMarco” isn't his birth name. It's Vernor Winfield McBriare Smith IV. But everyone always just called him Mac. Though his parents never married, when DeMarco was five, Agnes gave his dad, Mac III, an ultimatum: pay child support in the next six months or the kids legally take her last name. The money never came.

“I actually remember when she booted him out,” DeMarco says. “I was watching All Dogs Go to Heaven and I was already like, ‘Oh my god, this is so sad!’ And then my mom was like, ‘Your dad's not comin' back.’ I was like, ‘Nooooo!’”

Agnes calls DeMarco's father a “charming guy” but also “an alcoholic and an addict.” Mac's seen him a few times over the years. There's a video on YouTube where they meet up in a parking lot before a show in Santa Ana, California, last year. Mac III hands his son a beach hat—the kind dads wear—but the overall interaction is palpably tentative; he doesn't stay to see the show. “I guess I'm supposed to act like a son to this dude,” DeMarco says, “but at the same time, he's just some random guy.”

“What do you say to a father who you know chose alcohol and drugs over you?” Agnes wonders out loud. “How do you deal with that?”


When I stop by DeMarco's apartment again the next day, his girlfriend is home. Her name is Kiera McNally, but DeMarco almost never calls her “Kiera” to her face; it's “Kiki” or “Karen” or “Keeks.” She smiles and laughs in a warm, genuine way. Naturally, she has a very durable sense of humor.

Once again, DeMarco looks like he's about to fall over. It's after 9 p.m., and McNally has just woke him up from a long nap. “You were very mean,” she says to him, lovingly. “You said you wouldn't be mean and you were.” He explains that his waking impulse was to scream, “Shut the fuck up and let me sleep!”

“Ah well,” he says, rifling around for his lighter. “I should be up anyway—I've got to write one last song. And then do two more.”

DeMarco and McNally first met in Edmonton when they were 14 and started dating five years later, after McNally tipsily walked up to him and said, “You know what? I've always loved you.” Salad Days includes three tracks DeMarco calls “the Kiera songs.” The centerpiece is “Let My Baby Stay”. “She's essentially an illegal immigrant in America,” he says. “Her ability to enter and exit the States is threatened, so that's a stress for me, and it's pretty much all my fault.”

Last summer, they moved away from Montreal, where they had a bigger apartment and a much more domestic lifestyle. “Couple bullshit,” he calls it. “I tried it, but it's just not for me.” McNally sums up their disdain for Montreal's pretentions with a snooty impression of the city's scene: “We're going to a reading tonight.

They decided to try Brooklyn, eventually finding the small room in their current apartment, dubbed The Meat Wallet, alongside experimental and psychedelic bands including PC Worship, Tonstartssbandht, and the Dreebs. From the hallway, you can hear their roommate Pat Spadine, the composer behind Ashcan Orchestra, blaring noise music. “I'm probably the pussy of the crew,” DeMarco says.

But while their tight quarters offer a very intimate kind of tobacco-stained sanctuary, DeMarco's rise has affected his relationship with McNally, too. Last year, he was on tour for 10 months, with very few breaks in between. At one point, the pair went more than 90 days without seeing each other. “It gets hard coming back and having new friends and telling her all these stories,” DeMarco says. “It's almost a long distance relationship, even though we live in a tiny room together.”

The increased attention paid to DeMarco's music also means there are now pictures and videos of the couple together online. “It's fucking weird that our relationship's so public,” he tells me; while he twiddles McNally's cheeks at a pizza place near their apartment one night, somebody interrupts: “Oh hey, Mac DeMarco!” It all makes the songwriter worry about coasting on the internet's perception of their relationship. “I can't just objectify Kiera as this lovey-dovey thing to sell my records,” he says. He reiterates that Salad Days marks the first time he's written songs that are so personal.

In her best “mellow dude” voice, McNally says, “It's reality, man.”

Her boyfriend nods, adopting a faux-surfer voice. “Reality bites, dude.”

It's Saturday when DeMarco appears at the Wallet's gate with a huge smile. He's shaved his face (except his mustache) and changed his clothes for the first time all week. “What's up! Come on in!” I ask him how he's doing. “Great! I'm done!”

He spent the previous 24 hours sprinting to the finish line, recording the album's instrumental outro and putting some glockenspiel on “Let My Baby Stay”. He woke up watching videos on YouTube. He's happy. But there's still one thing left to do: fix the drums on the gentle new track “Go Easy”, which currently “sound like farts.” His Fostex reel-to-reel tape machine is down from eight working channels to six, and he's also discovered a side effect of chain smoking right next to it: The tape is warped. “The guitars sound so fucked up,” he says. “It's amazing.”

As he gets ready behind the drum kit, I find myself in the role of de facto engineer. “Press play and record at the same time,” he instructs. Midway through a good-sounding take, he stops and tells me to rewind and hit reset. “Jiggle it around,” he adds, “don't worry about fucking the machine up.” I am very worried about fucking the machine up.

I do what he says. “Sick. You'll be a studio whiz in no time.”

While he drums, he's incredibly focused. His eyes are closed, his hat backwards, a cigarette dangling from his bottom lip. His ash is about an inch long, just precariously teetering until it finally falls onto the snare after the chorus. He makes it to the end of the song and then listens back briefly.

“That's fine, I don't care, this song is such a pain in the ass to me,” he says. “It was hard to write it, hard to record it, I don't give a fuck. Perfectionist? That's not something I am. Fuck that.”

The other track he's just completed is called “Chamber of Reflection”, based on something he read about one of his favorite subjects, the masons. “It's a room people go into before you're initiated into freemasonry,” DeMarco explains. “It's like a meditation room, and they lock you in there for a period of time. The purpose is to reflect on what you've done in your life already and move on from it.” He's sitting in his folding chair, looking around his room. “I think that's what I did in this chamber of reflection right here.”

“It was actually therapeutic,” he continues. “I feel a little enlightened, a little less heavy.” He leans back, grins, nods, and raises his eyebrows. “It's tight.”

The next time I visit the Meat Wallet is three months later, in January, and this winter's never-ending snow is coming down hard outside. Some things haven't changed—the demon baby still hangs in the hallway, DeMarco is in the bathroom when I arrive—but his room has become more efficient and cozy. The drums are gone, the guitars are up on hangers. A rod near the ceiling now offers a place to put shirts and coats. There are clothes on the floor, but it's a manageable pile.

A couple of minutes later, DeMarco walks through the door, his hair reaching Doc Brown levels of untamed greasiness. He's wearing boxer briefs and a sweater. He shakes my hand, groans, and explains, unprompted, that he has “firehole to the fuckin' extreme” thanks to a past-midnight snack made up of two kinds of meat, spicy cheese, and jalapeños. He's planning on a vegetable-based lunch today.

Along with crashing Tame Impala frontman Kevin Parker's high school reunion in Perth, Australia, and catching a debilitating stomach parasite in Taiwan, the last few months saw DeMarco taking care of some serious business, too: He got McNally a visa for Christmas, legally extending her stay in the U.S.

Earlier in the day, Salad Days was officially announced online. And while the press release outlined a narrative about a maturing artist, it's not so simple with this guy. Two weeks before the announcement, DeMarco shared a faux-Death Grips message on Facebook, “leaking” the “title track” to his “album” Eddie's Dream. The accompanying video featured his friend Jesse, naked with an acoustic guitar covering his penis, lip syncing to a song with the lyrics, “Gimme pussy! A little bit of pussy!” Kids at shows have already started screaming for him to play the song live, but he says he never will. Later on, I hear him sing it aloud to no one in particular.

I hop into DeMarco and McNally's Dodge Caravan—technically, it's Anges' ride—and we're off to pick up a test press of Salad Days from his label, Captured Tracks. The snow is still coming down, but DeMarco's got the passenger seat window cracked open while he smokes (his own window doesn't work).

When we arrive at the label's record-store headquarters in Greenpoint, owner Mike Sniper and a few staffers congratulate DeMarco on all the internet traffic and accolades he's received from the Salad Days announcement and the release of “Passing Out Pieces”. They film a goofy Instagram promo. They read the comments. They're all happy to see him. He seems happy to see them.

They offer to play the test vinyl on the store's speakers, but DeMarco declines. Instead, we head out and start walking through the snowstorm. “That's nice going into the office when the track is getting a lot of hits, because they're all so happy to see me,” he says. “You know, instead of, like, ‘We're going to need a couple more singles.’”

DeMarco says that after he returned from a European tour in November, Captured Tracks asked for “an upbeat single” to be added to the record—something to pitch to late-night talk shows. They wondered if he'd re-record some of his old Makeout Videotape songs, which he flatly refused to do. “It's like going to the art gallery and being like, ‘Your painting doesn't look done to me,’” he says. Eventually, though, he complied: “Let Her Go” is undeniably TV-ready. It's also the kind of universal song DeMarco was trying to avoid writing in the first place. He says he feels bitter about having to deliver a song like that.

But any talk about such things takes place before and after we hit our main destination for the evening, Sunshine Laundromat, which offers reasonably-priced dry cleaning—as well as a vast array of pinball machines. DeMarco takes his pinball seriously; if you ask him a question during a game, you'll need to wait a second for an answer. After Theatre of Magic, Medieval Madness, FunHouse, White Water, and World Cup Soccer, he puts his last set of quarters into the Addams Family machine. His skills are impressive enough to earn him the third-highest score on the LED leaderboard. While the theme song plays, he hits the flippers and enters his name: “M-A-C.” It's the first time he's made the list on a machine in Sunshine.

That's my proudest moment today,” he says with an ecstatic expression. “Thought I was going to be so excited about my album launch? Noooo! I'm a family member on Addams Family, baby.” He pauses.

“I wonder how long my score will stay there. Hopefully a while.”