Over the past decade, Giannascoli has created prolifically. His work has evolved from self-released, emo-adjacent bedroom ruminations to the multifaceted soundscapes of 2017’s Rocket with a slow ease, a rumbling of something more – more uneasy, more complex – present in even his earliest work. The first lyric you hear on his 2010 album Race, “I’m here to kill my maker,” now feels like a premonition about his entire career, which has bloomed into something genre-defiant and unique.

Though he has spread his wings considerably over the past decade, Giannascoli is still best known within emo, and the response to his work still carries the precise, music-nerd enthusiasm characteristic of the genre. His fans know every song in his catalogue, and seize on bootleg recordings of new tracks with the enthusiasm of pole vaulters. He inspires this sort of devotion because he feels both familiar and far away; he is unassuming enough to seem like a guy you’d drink a beer with, and his lyrics can be disarming in their candour (new track Hope describes the loss of a friend to fentanyl, for example). But he is also withdrawn enough that when he does reappear, there’s a stir over what he might do next.

The zealousness of his supporters is one reason why Giannascoli finds his music difficult to discuss, at least publicly. For the most part, he thinks that his music should be what the listener makes of it. “That’s what makes me so hesitant in interviews,” he acknowledges, squirming slightly, presumably because he’s speaking to me, an interviewer. “To be talking about [the music] in a way that’s going to be digested by people before they hear the album, or even after they hear the album? That’s something that makes me – I hate saying ‘nervous’ – because the point is the thing. And everything I say about it is not the point.