2

Mac DeMarco put out two records on Captured Tracks in 2012. The first, the mini-LP Rock and Roll Night Club, was recorded on a four-track and slowed down until his voice came out as a low, Elvis-like croon. 2, released in October, drops the trick. It is his first full-length album under his own name, made alone in a Montreal apartment, and it became his breakout.

DeMarco grew up in Edmonton, recorded in Vancouver as Makeout Videotape and moved to Montreal in 2011. Rock and Roll Night Club was enough for the label to offer him an album. In June 2012 he told Toro he had about three quarters of it done, and that the low singing probably wouldn’t come back. The sleeve says he wrote, recorded and mixed everything that month at “Jizz Jazz Studios”, which was the cramped apartment he shared with his girlfriend. He had a handful of microphones, a tape machine, a drum kit, a guitar, a bass and eight tracks to fill. “Eight tracks is, I feel, a good amount,” he said in 2013. He played every part himself, without his touring band, because he doesn’t like waiting around on people, and he named The Band, Steely Dan and early-1970s production as the models. Josh Bonati mastered it in New York.

The songs stay close to home. “Cooking Up Something Good” opens on a family scene, mom at the stove and dad on the sofa, and the Guardian noted that the guitars are pitch-shifted when the chorus arrives; Pitchfork read the song as being about a father cooking drugs in the basement. “Freaking Out the Neighborhood” is an apology to his mother. “Ode to Viceroy” is a love song to the discount cigarettes he chain-smoked, written, by his 2012 account, to make up for flirting with another brand, and it promises to keep smoking them until he dies. “The Stars Keep On Calling My Name” asks a girl to leave town with him, with nowhere in particular to go. On “Robson Girl”, NME noted, the sweetness gives way at the bridge to the tremolo arm.

“My Kind of Woman”, the lead single, posted in July 2012, is the plainest love song here. “Still Together” closes the record as its only acoustic track, sung in falsetto. Its last seconds are DeMarco, guitar down, whispering to someone who has fallen asleep in her glasses.

Pitchfork gave 2 Best New Music, with Sam Hockley-Smith praising the economy of the writing and its family stories, and later ranked it 43rd of 2012 and 149th of the decade. NME’s Louis Pattison called DeMarco a skilful songwriter and a great guitarist, and Exclaim! welcomed the end of the glam act. The Guardian’s Michael Hann was cooler: a promising start that “never quite delivers”, because the tone never changes. Consequence of Sound compared it to Real Estate’s Days and predicted a backlash against music this simple. It was longlisted for the 2013 Polaris Music Prize, and Captured Tracks reissued it in 2022, for its tenth anniversary, with ten demos and outtakes added.

The Guardian’s complaint is fair as far as it goes: one player in one apartment, eight tracks and 31 minutes of the same palette. That is also the point. Dropping the slowed-down voice left nothing between DeMarco and the songs, and the songs are specific: a mother owed an apology, a brand of cigarettes, a girl asked to skip town. In 2019 Pitchfork called his influence on a generation of bedroom-pop acts “tough to overstate”, and this is where it starts. 2 is small on purpose and gets almost everything right at that size. It ends with a whispered goodnight.