THE GIANT DREAMS OF BARTEES STRANGE

HE'S BECOME ONE OF THE BUZZIEST ACTS IN MUSIC IN JUST TWO SHORT YEARS - AND HIS ENDLESS CREATIVE AMBITIONS ARE JUST WARMING UP

- JON BLISTEIN

BARTEES STRANGE needs a new hobby. Back when he wasn’t playing football in high school, studying communications in college, or working a nine-to-five at the FCC, he devoted every free hour to music. Now, his only job is writing, recording, and performing songs that defy the gravity of genre to scale some of the highest ambitions on the planet — and that leaves him with time to kill.

He’s thinking of taking up rock climbing.

“I’ve been watching all the documentaries,” Strange, 33, says between spoonfuls of pho on a gray March afternoon in Brooklyn. He’s never actually been rock climbing, he’s quick to add: “I’m horrified of heights, which is probably why I want to do it.”

Whatever Strange wants to do, odds are he’ll pull it off. That doggedness is a big part of what has made him, in just two short years, one of the most riveting voices in rock and beyond. He announced himself in March 2020 with Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy, less a covers EP than a wholesale reimagining of five songs by the National, one of his favorite bands. Seven months later, in the thick of the pandemic, he released his debut album, Live Forever. It is pop-punk, indie rock, hip-hop, emo; it is R&B, psych-noise, deep house, country. It is all of this, seamlessly distributed across 11 tracks, and sometimes packed into one perfect song, like the instant stunner “Boomer.”

Jamie Coletta, Strange’s co-manager, remembers hearing Live Forever for the first time in 2019: “At first, frankly, I was scared of it. It was like hearing the future.”

Live Forever put Strange at the center of a bidding war that eventually landed a deal with 4AD, the venerable U.K. label that will release Strange’s second album, Farm to Table, in June.