"Knowing that people are expecting something is just going to drive you insane.
"A lot of pressure from the label, a lot of pressure from every which way," he explains. Namely, facing the weight of expectation surrounding Salad Days. This icon of chill now finds himself in an unprecedentedly un-chill position. Reading this on mobile? Click here to view "Just some of Kiera's underwear," he says cheerfully. "I mean, I live like a scumbag," he says, yawning, "but it's cheap." Something on the floor catches his eye and he quickly swipes it out the way. Various half-eaten packets of snacks are strewn around the room and the scented candle he lights is a touching if hopeless gesture to mitigate the cigarette-smoke fug. He's wearing mid-blue "dad" jeans and a nondescript T-shirt which, along with his ever-present baseball cap and gap-toothed grin, constitute the signature Mac DeMarco look. He was disturbed, he explains, by some small-hours techno everyone else in this warren of a building is a musician, too. It's early afternoon and he's just woken up. Underneath is the cramped little cave that forms his studio: every song on his new album, Salad Days was recorded here. Since moving from Montreal six months ago, De Marco has shared a cupboard-sized, windowless room with his college sweetheart, Kiera, who lounges above us on the loft bed while we talk. Thankfully, everything else remains puerile. He's said that he began writing songs as a joke but by 2012, when his first full-length record, 2, was laurelled with a "Best New Music" recommendation from Pitchfork, it was clear that the music itself had become pretty sophisticated.
Sometimes sleazy, always sincere, his songs have a kind of slacker-stealth to them: his sweet and sleepy voice creeps up on you, earworming its way in until someone asks you to stop humming. DeMarco's lovable jackassery has helped make him a kind of brohemian hero, but it's his talents as a songwriter that have sustained the love. This seems like a perfectly appropriate opener for a guy who has a well-established reputation for getting butt-naked onstage. Finally, I reach him on the phone and ask, tentatively, whether he was expecting me. W ay out in Bed-Stuy, a frontier of Brooklyn whose colonisation by all things "artisanal" is probably still a good half-decade off, I find Mac DeMarco's front door: rusty, graffitied, behind iron bars and, after many rings, unanswered.
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