Bradford Cox made a whole record about how we can’t trust our memories. That sentiment was there in the title of Deerhunter’s 2010 album, Halcyon Digest, which implied that it would be a collection of memories of a golden era. But no, like everything the band had recorded to that point, it was a collection of songs about sickness, death, perversion, and isolation. His point seemed to be that even if things were different in the good ol’ days, they still probably kinda sucked.

Deerhunter is a different band now than they were then. Fauver left the band before the release of their 2013 album Monomania, and he passed away in 2018. On the day Cox and I meet, he’s only a couple of days removed from speaking at Fauver’s memorial service, which has him thinking about the ways he and the band have changed over the years.

There had been bands that sounded like Deerhunter before, but few fronted by characters as charismatic as Cox, and few that were inclined to pair such dramatic, thoughtful music with anarchic live performances that—as Cox told SPIN in 2008—involved cardiac episodes and mimed sex acts. In an era when rock music—and to use a term that Cox tells me he abhors—"indie" were mannered and polite, Deerhunter were outsized outliers.

And yet, here he is, remembering. Deerhunter formed in Atlanta in the early years of the 2000s, originally the prickly, punkish product of a collaboration between Cox and friends. The at-times tumultuous comings-and-goings of their band members has been recounted at length elsewhere , but the core cemented shortly after the release of their first album Turn It Up Faggot. Cox and guitarist Lockett Pundt, alongside drummer Moses Archuleta and bass player Josh Fauver, rose to prominence in the latter part of the aughts on a string of records that synthesized Cox’s fascination with both composerly avant-garde-isms and the grand mythos of Americana and rock ‘n’ roll.

This is probably why, fidgeting with an oversized brown suit that shrugs off of his shoulders in a manner that’s somewhere between teen-at-a-job-interview and Stop Making Sense, Cox starts our interview by lambasting the very concept of looking back at his catalog and picking favorites.

On January 18, Deerhunter will release Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, another record with a remembrance built into its title. But like Halcyon Digest, it’s skeptical of the past. The opening track “Death in Midsummer” has a dramatic refrain in which Cox yowls “There was no time to go back.” The rest of the record follows in kind. It is decidedly forward looking, full of the instrumental experimentation and formal contortions that the band started exploring on 2015’s Fading Frontier. It’s a bold step into the unknown, the sort that the band has always made.

“Conversations have come up about how chaotic and how frightening our shows were at that time,” he says. “People have said to me directly that we’ve mellowed or cheapened ourselves or sold out. There are some people that don’t move on from their youth, and we bury them. I moved on. I disavowed punk. I want to be a better person and a healthier person. I don’t relish thinking about a time in which I was coughing up blood onstage.”

You were really young at that point. We recorded that first album and Cryptograms in the same year. It’s not that we were better songwriters or something just a few months later, but we’d never had our footing in the studio. I’d always been self-recorded. When I listen to that album, if I’d just had an extra week to think about things, it might be in a different position on the list. Or I might acknowledge it as something I’ve done. At this point, I consider it to be a student film. You don’t rank a great filmmaker’s thesis film at film school as among their filmography.

Noisey: In the ranking that you sent over, the record that got talked about as your debut is missing. Bradford Cox: Oh yeah. I’ll tell you the truth. I sent the email accidentally. I have a new computer. The new MacBook’s keyboards are really weird. I pressed enter to start a new line and it was like, “Wooosh… OK, well that’s fine.” I would have put that one last, but I don’t generally acknowledge it. We didn’t know what we were doing. It wasn’t the fault of the engineer or of any of the musicians. We didn’t have the time that we’ve had since to experiment in the studio.

Something separates this from the first record though. Certainly instrumentally. We were using bells and tape loops and vocal loops. It was becoming less of a guitar-bass-drums, post-punk revival band. I’ve always been interested in composers, like Stravinsky and Messaien. I wanted to make something that wasn’t “action music.” I wanted to make something that was a little more like a landscape. [Andrei] Tarkovsky, the filmmaker, was a huge influence. There’s these long, slow shots. That’s what I was going for.

So by the time Cryptograms comes around, it sort of comes together. I still hate the vocals. When I was a kid and I was learning how to record myself, I learned that in order to make my vocals stand out in the mix I had to somehow boost them to the point of distortion. You hear this in a lot of garage rock and stuff. The Strokes had that distorted vocal, telephone-filter sound. For me, it wasn’t emulation, it was the only way I could figure out, with the limited technology that I had, to not make the vocals sound buried and muddy. That’s one problem I have with Cryptograms. I wanted the vocals to sound like Bowie, but they sound instead like some kind of post-punk, distorted early 2000s thing.

It wouldn’t have been in the headline about you. Or it may have been a headline, but it would have been in a condescending way. It was very difficult. Me being who I was, was a handicap in a way.

Like? Like sick and dying children. I think we were one of the first queer bands in our genre. I find it interesting now. It’s very easy for bands to market themselves as queer.

There was some illness and some stressful situations that informed the making of this record. What was that exactly? Well, I had the flu, but a lot the record was based on being ill when I was young. I spent a lot of time in hospitals growing up. I always thought that perhaps that made our records stand apart because there was some reality behind it. It wasn’t “Oh baby, oh girl, let me get with you” in garage rock language. None of our albums have ever been romantic or sexual. All of our albums have been about what most people consider things you don’t want to look for as subject matter in entertainment.

You said in an interview around when Cryptograms came out you had “no agenda and no idea what we were doing.” Still don’t. And no aspirations, no ambitions. People that I’ve known that have built their lives around a plan often find themselves disappointed. It’s less easy to find yourself disappointed when you have no idea where you’re going.

The gay ghetto. Was that a point that you’d seen a change in the way “indie” was approaching queerness? No. Jonsi and Owen and myself, we never benefited from the marketing concept of being queer. That wouldn’t happen until much later. And then ageism gets into it. It’s a problematic conversation. Frankly, I don’t enjoy it. I’m happy being alone. That’s my sort of endgame. I want to be alone and I want to be left alone. Every type of romantic engagement that I see out there is almost always a direct reflection of capitalism, commodity fetishism, power dynamics, submission, domination, trade, trying to pull one over on another person. It’s competition and I hate competition.

What do you mean? Well, they alter queer culture to be palatable to them and then they pat themselves on the back for becoming so accommodating. I was always unapologetic. You can read any of those old interviews. I got myself into trouble all the time. What was really ironic about the whole thing was that I remained a virgin through all of it. I was never sexually active. I never had any interest in any real relationships or sexuality. I think that earned me a disentitlement from my queer legacy. “Oh, he’s not actually gay.” I think I am, actually. People want you to be queer in their guidebook fashion.

It seems like it’s been a democratic thing. Yeah. And then with Halcyon Digest there was this sense that it was more of my show. Then it became more of me and Ben Allen’s show, a competition between me and him over the sound of the record. I would do things like… I insisted we record “Basement Scene” in an actual basement, and I insisted that a 14-year-old boy—one of the engineer’s sons—engineer it entirely. The thing that I should say, though, is that when there were collaborations, they were the highest of our career. My favorite Deerhunter song of all time is on that record, “Desire Lines.”

A lot of your records, you’ve talked about how the circumstances of making them were really heavy. But this was the only one where I didn’t notice any of that. Did it feel different? Oh, there was drama. I was learning to get along with [producer] Ben Allen. We did not come to the project seeing eye to eye. I was like, “I know what I’m doing” and he was coming off the success of a lot of things and he had his ideas. I thought that he was enormously competent, but I wasn’t looking for an artistic collaborator at that point, so we did not get along. The rest of the band, I feel, began withdrawing away from the project because I was trying to defend our group interests vocally. And when there’s one person being very vocal, it starts to appear as if there’s a leader. On Cryptograms, and when Josh Fauver was in the band, the band was all equally engaged. There was no leader of the band.

That’s one of my favorites too.

Would it surprise you to know I have nothing to do with it? I play the lead guitar on the first verse, but Lockett redid it on the second verse because I didn’t do it as well. We were just going to quit and record the album somewhere else. So we were like, “OK, we’ll try one more song.” And Ben said, “Can I just do this my way? Since you’re obviously not happy with what I’m doing, let me just do one thing without you stepping on my toes and breathing down my neck and micromanaging me. Let me do my job without interference.”

Ben had input and he said, “Get out.” I was removed from the studio. Of course I agreed to it. I took a drive around and came back to my favorite Deerhunter song ever. I was not in the room.

A lot of people seem to gravitate toward Lockett’s songs.

Lockett is an amazing songwriter. If he wrote the way I wrote, our albums would be mainly Lockett’s songs. I’ve never rejected a song of Lockett’s. People wonder why I write the majority of everything and why it’s the Bradford show. It’s not because I want to be.