Despite the flash flood, Union Pool is packed on Thursday night for John Maus’ sold-out show. It’s his first New York performance in over five years. The experimental-pop musician always possessed reclusive tendencies, but that intensified when photos circulated of him and his longtime musical accomplice Ariel Pink standing outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the pro-Trump riots. Many assumed the pair attended in support of Trump; Pink worsened the situation with a self-pitying appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight in which he referred to Trump’s “unprecedented success as US president.” Maus, in his typical cryptic fashion, posted Mit Brennender Sorge, a 1937 encyclical by Pope Pius XI widely interpreted as a critique of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and then more or less disappeared. He was slated to play George Clanton’s Queens festival ElectroniCON in 2023 but was ultimately dropped from the lineup amid backlash.

Maus announced Later Than You Think this past June. His first album since 2018’s Addendum arrives in journalists’ inboxes with an accompanying bio that finds Maus remorseful for how he handled the scandal. “I should have been clearer that I’m absolutely against Trumpism,” he says in it. “It wasn’t as forthright a denunciation as it should have been.” The bio explains he was in DC to discuss composing the score to a new film by director Alex Moyer; Moyer felt compelled to shoot footage of the protest, and Maus came along.

Later Than You Think is another revelatory addition to the enigmatic artist’s discography. The ecstatic synths in “Came & Got” echo the beauty of 2011’s We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves, and the lead single “I Hate Antichrist” serves as a sequel to that LP’s beloved cut “Cop Killer.” Maus’ mantras reckon with reconstruction, madness, mortality, and loneliness. As the album cover’s stained glass windows suggest, the tracks lean into hymn territory, especially on the ascendent “Let The Time Fly.”

At Maus’ hotel before the show, the 45-year-old meets with photographer and fellow journalist Nick Dove and me. Dove has a fascination with Maus’ philosophical work, and I was curious about his new record and his time away from the spotlight. Throughout our chat, Maus sits on the lobby couch clad in a hoodie and jeans, restlessly bouncing his leg as he answers questions. Later, he’ll appear completely liberated from the anxieties of social interaction as he shouts into a microphone on stage while swinging his head back and forth. During the zanily triumphant 2007 anthem “Rights For Gays,” he’ll sing the simple hook while jogging in a circle. At one point he’ll start doing pushups. Mostly, though, he’ll stand close to the crowd and sing to his fans like a preacher giving a sermon. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition to his insecurities in conversation, the way he claims no position of authority, occasionally asking if he’s making sense or if he sounds dumb.

Below, read our conversation with Maus about his quote-unquote cancelation, his new record, the changing media landscape, Luigi Mangione, and his entire career.

—Danielle Chelosky

NICK DOVE: You’ve been labeled as an outsider artist and connected to a lot of other people considered outsider artists. How do you view this concept and being labeled that, in today’s increasingly hyper-connected cultural landscape? Do you still believe it has the same subversive potential today that it once did?

JOHN MAUS: I think all the best stuff is outside. I mean, I don’t know which I am. 2010s blog-rock, is that what my genre is, or what genre would you categorize it as? I don’t know, but there’s definitely an outsider element. I think maybe what makes something that way is it’s not manufactured or polished or something like that. It’s actually coming from the outside.

DOVE: From the heart, authentic.

MAUS: Yeah, something like that. I think that’s always subversive, that’s always radical to begin from a standpoint outside of the given.

DOVE: You’ve spoken about music’s capacity to bear witness for universal truth, something that’s beyond mere genre. With the music industry increasingly shaped by algorithm-driven fleeting trends and moments that are often instantly forgotten, what does universal truth look like to you in contemporary music? Are there any artists or movements that you see successfully pursuing it in this landscape?

MAUS: Well, I mean, it’s in the same place that it was for me 10 years ago. I could be wrong, but I kind of think of the whole popular music — post-war popular music — as one event, being from Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Elvis and all that stuff up until everything else that’s happened, everything current that’s happening now, that’s one musical event. Maybe the other ones of the 20th century would be jazz from Armstrong to Coltrane, or the integral serialism thing from Schoenberg to Xenakis and Boulez and all those guys, and then Cage and his circle of experimental music. Those are different truths. That’s how I’ve always looked at it and talked about it. So rock and roll or punk or pop or whatever you call it might have genres, but it’s one event. So for me the truth of it is in the same place. I like this idea that it’s a misuse of World War II equipment, the hi-fi technology that they used to track submarines. That’s what gave us our stereo and listening devices and things like that.

So it’s just sort of this… What are we? We grew up in the ’80s or even before that, we’re totally cut off from the old culture. We’re eating Domino’s pizza and playing Nintendo and history begins and ends with that event, with pop music, with rock and roll. That’s our history. There’s things about that music that set it apart from musics of other epochs, radically apart. The lack of thematic integrity, I think, is one big one, where you don’t have the motive, Sonata development or something into a whole. The lack of functional harmony, we totally abandoned that. In a sense, we could almost jokingly say we’re atonal. It’s diatonic, but we’re not doing the adventure of key thing anymore, like with the modulations, like the whole piece is about some journey from C minor to C major, or something like that.

So there’s an ineptitude to it. There’s a primalness to it, to this music. I’ve said before, it abandoned functional harmony, and in some ways it’s closer to, on the harmonic level, medieval music in early Renaissance especially, so you can steal stuff from that. I’ve done that. And so that was kind of my wager. I’ve just continuously pursued that. And so in terms of today, the younger guy I collaborated with, Eyedress, I feel like he’s carrying the torch with this idea about it. He’s somebody who seems to share similar suspicions to me. And there’s other people, too.

DANIELLE CHELOSKY: It’s been seven years since your last album. On a podcast you said you only started writing these songs like a year ago. So what were you doing before that?

MAUS: It was just crazy times between. I don’t know if it went as fast for everybody else as it did for me, but it does not feel like it’s been that amount of time. We had to move, COVID was going on, just a lot of crazy stuff was happening, especially in 2019 and 2020, finally got a place and settled in.

CHELOSKY: Where?

MAUS: It’s in Missouri. I mean, we could afford to get one there. So we posted up, and I don’t know, I’ve tried playing with different stuff for a while, different things. Like, this is way before GPT and all that stuff. I was playing with GPUs, like trying to do nets, like TensorFlow. I figured it would be a cool, new form of synthesis, or something like that.

CHELOSKY: Is that related to ChatGPT?

MAUS: Yes, but before the slop was ubiquitous, the architecture was there with these convolutional neural nets. Do you guys remember DeepDream, the dog heads? Like, coming out of the wall, dog heads and stuff? I’m like, What is this? This is crazy. So I was playing with that. I thought it would maybe generate some interesting samples, or something like that. But then I just started to work. I did a show in London and was like, “It’s time. I gotta start.”

DOVE: How do you feel that your mission as an artist, if at all, has changed since the release of your last album?

MAUS: I think it’s the same. And that’s why I always feel dumb just repeating the same things I was saying in 2011. There’s no new information there. Unfortunately, it’s the same wager, the same suspicion. Compared to Screen Memories, I tried to relax a little. Wasn’t as far up my own ass with this one. Maybe more straightforward, more because I really don’t know if it got away from me a little bit on that one by trying to do too much or something like that. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s the same mission.

DOVE: I’ve always seen your artistic work and philosophical work as being intertwined together. Connecting back to your thesis Communication and Control and its dealing with systems of control, do you believe that there are new evolutions of these systems of control, and if so, challenges from them?

MAUS: I think we’re on the precipice, I would wager, of this moment that I was just talking about coming to its end. Whether it’s a world war, God forbid, or something like that. We’re in the midst of a phase transition in terms of the mechanisms of control. So new music and new forms of subjectivity will arise in the midst of that. This old form is sort of this post-war moment, capitalist hegemony, whatever. It has reached this threshold with its molecularization and smart machines and everything like that. I think we’re on the precipice of some new order.

CHELOSKY: I saw you recently got a TikTok account. How’s it going for you?

MAUS: Good, good, good. I mean, I’m just trying to be proactive. I never did before. For 20 years, I haven’t been, and that caused me problems, because I wasn’t social media savvy. I think some of the things I got into, I could have avoided if I had been online and understood how the conversation is going right now. But literally up until like three years ago, the only time I went on Twitter was once or twice. I didn’t follow any of that, like the camps, the different groups. I was kind of an imbecile about all of that. I was just out in Minnesota building synthesizers. I was not online, so I didn’t know about any of this shit that everybody knew about. What I’m saying is like, three years ago, I get on there and I didn’t even know about freaking memes. I saw somebody doing the epic handshake thing, I thought that was the first somebody had ever made that image. I was like, oh, that’s so funny. They use the predator handshake.

CHELOSKY: You’re telling me that Ariel Pink wasn’t keeping you updated?

MAUS: No, no. I didn’t live in LA. I lived out in Austin, Minnesota for 10 years. And so the only time I would see him really is when he’d come through Minneapolis to play and I’d go up there and see him play. So I wasn’t abreast of any of it. But then three years ago, I started going on Twitter and group chats. And right now I’m getting caught up on all of it. I’m like, “Oh, now I get it. The epic handshake meme. Other people use that too. That’s what a meme actually is.”

DOVE: Do you think your art would have been impacted if you had been more online during these periods?

MAUS: Part of me wishes, hindsight being 20/20, that I’d been more savvy in like 2011 when Pitiless came out. I could’ve been more of a hustler or something like that. If I had been savvy, I could have capitalized on that. But I wasn’t even sure if I was gonna do music at that point.

CHELOSKY: What’s your screen time like now that you’re using social media?

MAUS: I’m trying to dial back on it, but yeah, I could do eight hours a day.

DOVE: I feel like that’s normal. My screen time is probably more than that. There’s actually a lot of threads in here that actually wind up tying into one of these questions I wrote that refers back to Pitiless. The title, We Must Become Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves, is one of your mentor Alain Badiou’s “15 Theses On Contemporary Art” and reflects his call for rigorous self-discipline and art to avoid the betrayal of truth. How did this principle of pitiless censorship guide your creative process in Later Than You Think? And furthermore, what do you think the prospects for such are in a pop culture context, where the platforms in this online world seem to amplify and encourage a more sort of a gotcha, unfiltered expression over disciplined truth seeking?

MAUS: Pop music is so weird in that because the lack of discipline is kind of native to it in a way, like the ineptitude is part of it, the trying to catch that lightning in a bottle of the raw ineptitude of things. That’s part of its magic. That’s the zebra stripe of its stupidity or whatever.

DOVE: Where do you draw the line between the level of authenticity and performativity? Because it’s very hard to tell in these contexts.

MAUS: I wish I had thought more about it. In that podcast I did, I was telling the guy, I kind of came apart with that, that idea of ethics. It comes to a point where it’s not sustainable, in my opinion, if you’re talking about the truth of music and everything in your life is either good or evil to the extent that it serves that truth. You can disintegrate. Nothing is off limits, you just go to the extremes for it. I think as I’ve gotten older, now I have more balance, that there’s truth in art, but that’s a truth and it’s not the truth. You have to put it in that perspective.

DOVE: But with Badiou, there’s four different truths.

MAUS: Yeah, that’s right. In science, in [love], in politics, and in art. I always kind of followed that with the politics too, that I thought it was a disparate domain of truth than art. And if you conflate them together, that’s kind of like the aestheticization of politics. They should be their own domain.

DOVE: Do you think this current media environment is pushing them all together in this way?

MAUS: Yeah. Well, I mean, film kind of pushes together all, so nothing stands on its own. I think everything’s getting more concentrated and condensed, even more than it was already, which was a lot relative to other epochs of music and you have to follow the tendency while at the same time resisting it. It’s the weird paradox that there’s no formula for. The prevailing historical tendencies, you have to totally embrace, but at the same time being an enemy of them somehow. There’s no recipe on how to achieve the subjective expression of the objective or whatever.

CHELOSKY: Part of why I wanted to interview you was because the bio for the album. Usually after an artist is quote-unquote canceled, they just burrow into self-victimization and spiral, but you were apologetic.

MAUS: I appreciate anybody who would give me the benefit of the doubt. I feel like there’s nothing that I could do now. Like, it’s totally out of my hands. Just have to expect for the rest of my life, if I put something on there’ll inevitably be 15 comments, and it’s like, I have it coming or whatever. That’s how I gotta look at it.

CHELOSKY: I mean, it is very rare that an artist responds to it the way that you have been responding to it. Just taking accountability.

MAUS: I don’t know what to do. I can do interviews and I can try explaining. Of course everybody’s always gonna think it’s trying to save face or something like that. That’s even stopped me from tweeting political stuff before, because people are just gonna think I’m just doing that to try to make up for it. But I said, when I did that one interview, part of it was not being more clear initially. I thought my legacy would speak for itself. I posted this cryptic thing saying racism and nationalism are evil. I thought that would be clear, but apparently it wasn’t clear enough. 2019, it’s like, what are my politics? It’s like the Invisible Committee and, like, Tronti and Tarì and Negri and Hardt. So in that sense, I’m guilty of doing the radical left thing. If I have to choose between the good cop and the bad cop, or the lesser of two evils, between genocide with two thumbs up and genocide with, oh, we don’t want to vote for the Iron Dome, but, you know, I’m sorry, we’re going to vote anyway. From the radical left, it’s just all the same. Some of my friends, of course, they’re like, “That’s not adult, take your medicine and go and vote for a blue no matter who, like you’re a child, this is real life.” There’s a critique there, certainly, but to just assume that I’m like Charlie Kirk or something… What am I even supposed to say to that?

CHELOSKY: I don’t know if it was you or your publicist, but the press release says “I Hate Antichrist” is a sequel to “Cop Killer.”

MAUS: That was me. I know it’s a chud thing too, but in my group chats, it’s like, “Oh, I’ve got to pay 30 grand for my health insurance, I hate Antichrist.” It’s just something we would say. So, yeah, it’s the cops.

CHELOSKY: So it’s your own meme in a way.

MAUS: Yeah.

DOVE: What was the most arduous one to compose for you on the album?

MAUS: That’s the thing I feel like on this one, I’m starting to get past arduousness and all these different aesthetic theories. The one I never really knew about was the aesthetic theory of Schoolmen, that art is recta ratio factibilium. It’s right reason with respect to things being made. So instead of tearing open a hole in the universe, doing whatever, the infidelity to the truth, it’s like just have right reason, just do it every day. So the arduousness wasn’t the same with this one. It’s like the opposite of arduous. It’s about putting that down.

DOVE: It was at the point where it was just coming out of you.

MAUS: Yeah. You have to not operate according to antecedent emotion. You just have to. You just do it every day. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

DOVE: How best do you think that artists can strive for that sort of transcendence outside themselves to create something that speaks to both themselves and their sense of the truly universal? Can one know that they’ve made something truly universal?

MAUS: I don’t know if you can know. It’s a dumb, tired, cliche thing to say, but you just do the best that you can do. I think it’s weird, because does the kind of life that you live outside of your work affect the work? That old question, it comes up a lot with drugs. Like, do these artists make their great work despite their proclivity to intoxication or because of it? I wager that it’s in spite of it.

DOVE: What do you think of the notion of interiority and crafting interiority when it comes to the creation of art? Because there’s so many people, especially in a place like New York City, living these very outward lives. They’re out all the time. They’re not necessarily spending a lot of time experientially in their own brain, but in this kind of constant state of reaction. Do you think that great work necessitates time spent alone in the mind, or does it not matter?

MAUS: That’s the thing I’m saying. Especially in the music of the last 50 years, there’s so many people that didn’t develop any interiority at all and didn’t have any practice of silence that we’re totally for the other and because of that mess somehow something transcendent came out of it. At least for me, though, it’s definitely necessary to develop some kind of detachment from all that, which is impossible, like you’re saying, with the perfect thing to do perfectly, but it’s always incrementally, like envy, and that sort of stuff, resentment that’s all poison and it gets in the way.

CHELOSKY: I wanted to ask about the song “Losing Your Mind.” Was that inspired by you?

MAUS: Yeah. It’s a warning against pharmakeia, against sorcery. It’s on the ascendancy right now. And at least for what my experience is worth, it’s a blind alley, it’s a dead end. That’s kind of what I’m saying. I looked there thinking that it would give me musical ideas or something like that. You’re just drooling on yourself in a room, making a cocoon out of snot. It doesn’t give you musical ideas.

CHELOSKY: So what’s the vibe in Missouri? What’s your day to day?

MAUS: There’s no vibe there right now because I’m so busy doing this stuff now, but before I left it was nice. You just get up at like seven and say my prayers and do my exercise and eat some eggs and go down and work all day.

CHELOSKY: Work how?

MAUS: Just go down to the basement and sit at the piano.

CHELOSKY: So you lost your mind in your basement?

MAUS: No, what’s interesting, this album has a lot of fragments of things that I had done 10 years earlier or something like that. They were just on a hard drive. So that would have been more like 2011 or 2009, just when Pitiless came out, before Pitiless came out, I thought it was dog shit and that I had totally failed to somehow push it to the next level. And so then I just started, as I’m saying, like, maybe if I try a psychedelic drug or if I do this or do that, it will increase the neural connectivity and I’ll come up with a new idea, so that’s what that was kind of about. You’re just losing your mind doing that.

CHELOSKY: I feel like this album is more serious than the past ones. Addendum had songs I found funny, like “Outer Space” and “Dumpster Baby,” but on this one I feel like no songs have a playfulness to them. They’re serious.

MAUS: Yeah, did you happen to hear the Rarities For The Road thing? Do you know about this?

CHELOSKY: No.

MAUS: I was selling CDs at shows that has stuff from this time period that’s not on Later Than You Think. And there’s a couple that have that, like “Alien Up In A Tree” and stuff like that that’s online, on YouTube and stuff like that, just to hold people over while we wait for the vinyls to get made. But yeah, this one, I think the ones that made the final cut, that dimension isn’t there, you’re right.

CHELOSKY: What about the album title?

MAUS: It’s a thing monks carve on skulls or something like that. Just remember you’ll die. It’s a memento mori. It’s later than you think, therefore hasten to do the work of God, like that sort of thing. We’re all gonna die really soon, like, really, really soon, like, incredibly soon, the older you get, the more it accelerates. It’s just crazy, and nobody really communicates that to you, and even if they tried, you wouldn’t be able to understand until it happens to you when like 10 years go by in like five seconds.

DOVE: Going off of that notion, what would the John Maus of 2025 advise to the John Maus of 2015, and where do you think the John Maus in 2035 will be?

MAUS: I would have advised myself to not put music as the main thing, to subject it to the higher truths, to exercise fidelity to the higher truths, and then the rest of the stuff will kind of orient, because if you put that out of order, you’re gonna lose your mind, like the song “Losing Your Mind” goes. So that would be my advice. Once you’re on the other side of that, once you’ve got the proper ordering of things, then it’s just a question of fidelity and growth and just slowly getting rid of vices and stuff like that. Doing the hard work of that. I would assume the one in 2035 would say, yeah, just keep going, keep going, do that.

CHELOSKY: What do you think happens after we die?

MAUS: I think that when we die, our intellect, our soul, our consciousness, is separated. It goes into the unnatural state of being separated from its matter, from its body and that it has some kind of judgment where it’s confronted with what it did while it was in time, what it did with its time, what it did before it was out of time, and that it’s just sort of frozen there, like that’s what it is. What it did with the time it had is what it was, what it is in eternity. It’s what it always will have been, and that’s what you are, from the standpoint of eternity, and you can’t do anything because you’re out of time. You can’t change it. So every millisecond you have is extremely, extremely important, because eventually you’re out of that. You’re out of it. You’re in aeviternity. I think the Schoolmen call it aeviternity because it’s not eternity, you did have a beginning, but you’re a fully actualized potentiality at that point. I don’t know, I think it’s a measure of change. I don’t know enough about it, like Einstein and relative and the speed and all that stuff but at least in the metaphysical sense that I’m talking about.

DOVE: You wrote “Because We Built It” inspired by the George Floyd [protests]?

MAUS: Yeah. The thing is you write lyrics, and then people are like, what does it mean? And you don’t always know what it means. And so just what came to mind for that was the Black Lives Matter protests, fighting structure, raging against the structural injustice. If you want to talk about politics, that’s kind of what I cut my teeth on, at least. It’s like that’s politics, when the tanks come out against you. When the people appear in the street in some sort of new form, new configuration, and say, “These are our streets.” Like a new people appears.

DOVE: Going back to what we were discussing earlier about this sort of moment that we’re potentially transitioning into, what do you think the prospects are for that on the near horizon?

MAUS: I don’t know. The beginning of the summer, there was some stuff, but the state is really, really clamping down.

DOVE: Yeah. There’s this theory called the “flooding the zone,” wherein there’s so many occurrences that are happening that you can’t necessarily react to each of them. I was wondering if you could actually connect that, or if you have any ideations on it, connecting back to Badiou’s thoughts on the idea of the event. If there’s so many events that are happening, how do we possibly keep track of them? Do they have the same impact as they used to?

MAUS: That’s why I’m saying politics is its own domain of truth. In my wager it’s what happens when people occupy the streets, things like that. This is where I’m saying a liberal could chastise me, say I’ve done wrongly by saying politics is not parliamentarianism and voting is when people appear in the street and then the state appears against them. Or at least this is my half-baked idea that I cut my teeth on. This idea of Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter or the student encampments. And going back to the earlier thing, like, I can’t even naturally judge it. I never really used social media, but now that I do, should I lend solidarity to that? And then it’s like, well, everybody’s just gonna fucking think I’m trying to save face.

But if the mass line, as Mao called it, appears, I’ll be in its ranks. Hopefully they might go, “What are you doing here? Aren’t you a chud?” But it’s kind of where I’ve always stood on it. We want to see more of that. It’s the only way.

CHELOSKY: What do you think about Luigi Mangione?

MAUS: I don’t know. That’s the guy that shot the healthcare [CEO], right?

CHELOSKY: Yeah.

MAUS: The propaganda of the deed, right? Like shooting a princess in the chest. But on the other hand, the memes like the R.I.P. bozo, all the sides do it on social media. Like, whenever a guy from either side dies, everybody’s laughing about it. Like I get it on a political level, of course, but on a deeper level, you notice it’s like what we are talking about is a finite existence that met eternity. But there’s no room for that sort of nuance in politics. Maybe you just got to go propaganda the deed. Shoot a princess in the chest, R.I.P. bozo, rest in piss.

And there was just another one. But — I understand this gets into dangerous territory — why don’t they go after Randy Fine? Why do they go after two understaffers? I’m just saying, if you’re gonna go down propaganda the deed — which everybody can — I would not recommend, there’s other ways, there’s other ways for your life, it’s open to all of us, you can do that, it’s before you all, you can do it — but if you are going to do it, at least maybe McConnell? Or orange man? See, I’m gonna get in trouble. I’m all coward. I’m all afraid. I’m afraid of getting canceled.

Later Than You Think is out 9/26 via Young.