Deerhunter’s music has always defied easy categorization, and on each of their albums — from the psychedelic pop of Cryptograms to the stark acoustics of Halcyon Digest — the band has reinvented their sound in some way. But no matter how their work has shifted from release to release, they have always been interested in asking big questions, even if they rarely provide concrete answers.

On their seventh album, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, out today from 4AD records, that impulse reaches metaphorical and literal heights. Named after a posthumously-published book by Jean Baudrillard, lead singer Bradford Cox describes it as a “science fiction album about the present.” But the album’s title wasn’t particularly sentimental. “I was attracted less to the content of the book and more to this idea of a philosopher who spends his entire career predicting the disappearance of [culture], and then, on his deathbed, realizes it hasn’t completely happened on its own during his lifetime,” he says. “There’s something sad and infinitely melancholy about that.”

He thought the title was a “beautiful picture frame” for the songs he had written.

Ahead of the album’s release, them. called Cox to discuss what inspired the record. But just like his music, any conversation with the artist is unpredictable, and before we finished, our 20 minute chat had turned into an hour-long discussion about life in post-Trump America, how to stand out in the Spotify streaming economy, what 40s-era Humphrey Bogart films can teach us about anti-fascism, and why the commodification of queer culture has left him feeling more isolated from the community than ever.

Zak Krevitt

So, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Sounds pretty existential.

It’s a book that was published posthumously by one of my favorite writers, Jean Baudrillard. Essentially, this French thinker’s whole career was a sociological analysis of how culture was disappearing. Now, especially with the internet, the line between what’s real and what’s created in the virtual world is disappearing.

Were those themes that you wanted to explore on this album?

Well, no. I write all my music stream-of-consciously, so it was already completed when I came upon the title. But I felt like I was surrounded by a sort of negative change in the world when I was writing, so it just infuses the work with a certain type of negativity.

Is this “negative change” tied to the fact that this is the first album you’ve written in a post-Trump America?