Enfnts Terribles

You’re finally stepping out of the spotlight of being just a producer. What is it like releasing your own music?

It’s not a totally different world. As a producer, I try to get really into the personality of everyone I work with, I make their personality come through in the sound design and everything. To then start my own music, I have to force myself to redefine my take on producing music, on how I personally contribute to the music, you know?

But even the act of producing and recording feels like a contemporary thing, like a lot of people can relate to it. I normally mess around with audio, and creating an album is like a really extended version of that. In PC, we throw in a lot of contrast like electronic versus acoustic, and by stepping into the spotlight a bit more, it made me prove there’s not so much of a difference between those two anyway.

You’ve helped to create other artists’ albums but now, you’re doing it for yourself and people already know your name and your music. Does that make you nervous?

The original reason why I have the alias A. G. Cook was to see it as a formal writing credit. I imagined myself working with different artists and didn’t want to put music out under my name because I didn’t want to explicitly have a sound of mine that they’d be referring to on album collaborations with others. I wanted to still be very flexible, it helped to be open to remixes because it showed I could still take on other sounds.

To be honest, I felt more nervous with my “Superstar” single, which came out already a few years ago. Back then, I thought: “Okay I’m going to sing this song in a funny way, and I’ll do it live a few times”, but I wondered about how long I should keep it. I had some bits overproduced, some bits underproduced, and deciding to stick to my guns in that was more nerve-wracking.

But with the release of my two debut albums, it feels a lot more natural, more well-rounded. I’m actually happy that I didn’t do an album in the first few years of my career because then I would have had a very funny idea about what it should have been. In other words, it would have felt more like those producers’ albums you sometimes have. But now, without even overthinking it, my debuts naturally feel more like artist albums. To keep true to myself, I made 7G versus Apple. Apple is condensed and very artist-focused, but then I also made 7G that has a lot of very producers’ moments, without those two contaminating each other too much.

As a label manager, you are always looking for new artists or new acts. What’s a good source for finding new acts?

Initially, we found people through shows and sometimes through helping friends carry line-ups. I feel like that was a big part of the more random signings, I guess. And more recently, we found artists through people themselves: I just heard their music online, and I felt they would fit. Sometimes it’s even just through demos. For example, Planet 1999 sent me a full demo; we released the exact thing, we didn’t even change the track order. We’ve worked a lot with them, even collaborated on a project for Charli XCX.

We either take people on who need help in terms of presentation, or people who I generally resonate with and want to work with on different projects. Right now, I’m meeting people through Zoom concerts, and I love the realization of: “Wow their set was incredible” when someone suddenly plays a lot of their own music that I didn’t know. Hearing an unfinished new piece of music from someone gets me excited. They don’t have to sound like stuff PC released in the past because when I find someone who has a whole catalog of music that they haven’t released and are not even confident about, that reminds me of the original ethos of our label.

One of the artists you work with very often is Charli XCX. When did you find a musical soulmate in her?

I’ve been following Charli’s early career because she went to art school with a few people I knew. She did one year of art school there, and some of my friends who took the same courses as her were like: “There’s this girl who is kind of a pop star, you’d be interested” and so I followed her and I really liked even the first single. But still, our paths never crossed.

Luckily then, our friend SOPHIE did the “Vroom Vroom” stuff. I got very attentionally involved in, more on the SOPHIE side, so I still hadn’t met Charli herself. We had these funny ideas of what each other would be like. Eventually, I ended up going to her housewarming with SOPHIE and met her in a very normal way. That’s when I realized we were pretty similar. She was expecting me to be a mythical guy who wouldn’t say very much. We actually immediately started talking about music.