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. The record is named for a therapeutic practice in which back pain is treated in order to address deeper health problems, and it’s an apt name for O’Connor’s most raw album to date: what may have began as a simple exercise in changing the purview of his writing ended up becoming his most confessional, open-hearted album to date.
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. Longer than any project he’s ever made and more musically varied, The Alexander Technique was made over a matter of years, started before and finished after 2022’s WHO CARES?; listening to it feels like watching an artist grow in real time, and face all the attending growing pains that come alongside. “I’ve made a lot of love songs over the years, and I feel as though this is the first time I’m trying to make a project about everything in life. In my mind, it’s exactly what I’ve always wanted to make.”
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.
The Alexander Technique feels poised to continue O’Connor’s rise. On opening track “Alexander,” O’Connor recounts a doctor’s appointment in which he tried to get pain relief for his own sore back, only to be met with questioning about whether the rest of his lifestyle was really that healthy: “I see some anger in you, plus addiction, plus the rest…” “‘Alexander’ set a certain bar in my mind of like, ‘Okay, this is the landscape and the subject matter’. A lot of my favourite music is super honest and painful – I wanted to make vulnerable, honest, diary-entry style, almost confrontational music,” he says. “Alexander,” and the title The Alexander Technique, allowed O’Connor to foreground what he describes as a key theme of the record: “It’s about being present and trying to be in the moment and enjoy life in front of you – being accepting of life as it is, however good or bad it may be.”
That desire to be present permeates the entirety of The Alexander Technique, which is unguarded and raw, sometimes uncomfortably so, while retaining a deep sense of gratitude and lashings of O’Connor’s trademark zest for life. As he sings on “Therapy” over a warm, melancholy organ: “Growing up in public wasn’t great, nah/But I wouldn’t ever trade it in for a life less insane.” Throughout The Alexander Technique, O’Connor grapples with his life to this point, with an honesty that even longtime fans may find confronting. “Putting my heart on my sleeve is a real benefit, and in some ways, a kind of sacrifice,” he says. “You give yourself away on a bigger level, you kind of give away a bit of real life and your personality, and it’s confusing to be that as well as myself, a real person.”
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.”
You can hear that painstaking work on tracks like “Guitar Song,” a coming-of-age tale that sprawls from soft acoustic folk through a rich orchestral section into freeform California-style jazz, and “Carrera,” a moody electro-funk song over which O’Connor sings a run-on melody that swerves and gambols across the song’s runtime. Working with friends meant that O’Connor felt he could be as unguarded musically as he was lyrically: “You let your guard down somewhat – you’re able to completely yourself, rather than working with someone you don’t know so well.”
“Guitar Song,” for O’Connor, speaks to themes of insecurity and sense-of-self, which he considered deeply while writing The Alexander Technique. “It’s about wanting to find my place, and body image issues, looking at myself when I was younger,” he says. “It’s about insecurity in a big way – comparing myself to others.”
At other times, O’Connor looks outside himself for inspiration, landing on self-contained universes of life and feeling as a result. On “The Table,” casual interest in a wooden table leads to a zoomed-out meditation on the lives of others, its rich backing of guitar and saxophone feeling simultaneously intimate and huge, like the lyrics. “Who sat beneath that tree?” he wonders, “Which lovers carved initials, what happened on the ground around it?” It’s a marker of O’Connor’s songwriting prowess, which continues to grow with each successive album. Written on a recording trip in Greece, “The Table” arrived in the middle of the night as a spark of inspiration: “I was awake until three, just finishing things, and then I lay down and saw a side table, and the first lyric came into my head,” he recalls. “I was just in the zone, so I felt like I should just follow the lyrics through and note everything down.”
It’s this kind of poignant songwriting that’s made O’Connor one of Gen Z’s defining artists: songs that cut to the heart ofeveryday 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.
