Brick

Most of Rocket is tender in an awkward, sideways way. Then, near the middle, a drum machine lurches in, a guitar turns to static, and a voice that has spent the album murmuring starts to scream. "Brick" lasts about two minutes, and it leaves a mark on the record out of all proportion to its length.

It is the song people mention when they want to explain how unpredictable (Sandy) Alex G can be. It is also, by the songwriter's own account, one of the least mysterious things he has made.

A single that nobody expected

"Brick" arrived on May 4, 2017, paired with "Sportstar," two weeks before Rocket came out on Domino.^[4][5] The pairing was deliberate in its contrast. "Sportstar" is a soft, Auto-Tuned love song, while "Brick" was received as a hardcore screamer.^[6][7] One reviewer called it a near-hardcore temper tantrum that could have slipped onto a recent Show Me The Body release.^[3][2] Another outlet heard two minutes of chaotic noise.^[7]

Earlier previews, including "Proud," "Bobby," and "Witch," had been gentler, and listeners arriving at "Brick" had reason to think they knew the record's temperature.^[2] They did not.

How a song like this gets made

Alex Giannascoli has been unusually frank about the origin of "Brick," and it is not a story about rage. In a Spin interview he described messing around on guitar, liking the sound, adding a drum machine, then stacking more distorted guitar until the track existed. He called it an uninteresting origin story.^[1]

That plainness matters. The song did not begin as a confession that was then dressed in noise. It began as a texture, a sound he enjoyed, and the emotional content arrived through the process of building it. This is how he describes his writing in general: chord progressions come from guitar, arrangement comes from listening back and looping the best parts, and vocal melodies start as humming, with words that fit arriving quickly and getting kept.^[1]

Much of Rocket was recorded on a laptop and microphone carried in a backpack, with bandmates tracked wherever it was convenient, and he has said he used an old copy of GarageBand 6 even after signing to a bigger label.^[3][1] "Brick" sounds like the product of that setup. The distortion is thick and the rhythm is mechanical. The whole thing feels made in a room rather than a studio.

Where it sits on the album

"Brick" is the seventh of fourteen tracks, and at roughly two minutes and twelve seconds it is among the shortest.^[4] Reviewers treated it as one of the album's outliers, far from the folk-leaning songs that surround it.^[3] Its placement does something specific. By the time it ends, the listener has been told that this record is not going to be a consistent mood, and that the gentleness elsewhere is a choice rather than a default.

That fits how Giannascoli talks about the album as a whole. He has said he thinks about characters while writing, but that any larger narrative is loose, and that each song is a fragment of a thought whose characters follow their own paths.^[1] A piece like "Brick" is a fragment in the most literal sense: a burst of feeling with no setup and no resolution. The title itself is blunt, a heavy and inert object, and the song plays like something thrown or something hit.

Reading a song with no stated subject

The song gives no stated subject, and a track like this tends to invite listeners to supply their own. For a track like "Brick," that is a fair description of the situation. The song gives you intensity and almost nothing else, so each listener fills the gap from their own life. Two minutes is not much time to build a private story, and the song seems to like it that way.

Why the meaning stays out of reach

Because the vocals are screamed over distortion, the words are hard to parse on a first listen, and that appears to be partly the point. Giannascoli has said he keeps things vague on purpose, because he likes music that listeners can sit with and feel rather than decode.^[1] He has also pointed to Modest Mouse and their nonsensical lyrics as a formative influence, admitting he borrows something of Isaac Brock's approach.^[1]

So there is no authoritative paraphrase of what "Brick" is about, and none of the interviews and reviews gathered here offers one. What they do offer is a consistent description of the song's emotional posture: aggression, frustration, a loss of composure. It is easy to hear it as a release valve, an outburst that interrupts an otherwise careful record, though that is a listener's reading rather than anything the songwriter has stated.

Three ways to hear it

As catharsis. One natural reading treats the song as the record's pressure valve. After a run of songs full of wary, unfinished young characters, the speaker finally stops managing his feelings.^[3] Two minutes is long enough to burn off the tension and short enough that nothing has to be explained afterward.

As a genre experiment. Giannascoli arrived in the Domino era with critics already reaching for easy comparisons, and he was adjusting to music as a full-time job and to label pressure.^[3] A hardcore-adjacent screamer is one way to refuse a tidy identity. Seen that way, the song is less about any person than about the freedom to sound however he likes.

As a character sketch. Since he describes his songs as fragments of thought attached to invented people, "Brick" can be heard as a voice from one of them, a person at the end of their patience, rather than a self-portrait.^[1] The song's lack of context lets that figure remain unnamed.

Why it lingers

It would be easy to treat "Brick" as a novelty, the loud one, the track a reviewer cites when summarizing the album's range. But it earns more attention than that. In a body of work known for gentleness and for narrators who hedge, it shows the other side of the same sensibility: the same ear for texture and the same refusal to explain, pointed at something violent.

It also complicates the idea that quiet songs are the honest ones. The restraint on the rest of Rocket can read as vulnerability, but a song this abrupt suggests that the restraint was always a decision. The screaming is just the version where the decision is suspended.

The songwriter behind the noise

Giannascoli began as a bedroom recordist in the Philadelphia area, and his homemade albums spread through Bandcamp and blogs before any label was involved. He signed to Domino, which released Beach Music in 2015 and Rocket two years later.^[8] By the time of Rocket, he had also drawn attention for his guitar work on Frank Ocean's albums, an experience he described as simple and low-key.^[3]

He had recently turned 24, and he was already writing new material while adjusting to music as a full-time job and to the pressure of working with a label.^[3] That is a useful lens for the whole record. It is the sound of someone trying out how many different people he is allowed to be, now that an audience is listening.

The name on the cover was part of the experiment. The new billing arrived alongside this batch of songs, and a track like "Brick" shows how far the music could stretch from the soft-spoken persona many fans had come to expect. Whether the name was meant as a mask is left open.

What the sound is doing

It helps to describe the music plainly, since the words are hard to catch. A programmed beat sets a stiff, unswinging pace. Guitars are pushed into distortion until chords smear into texture. The vocal is shouted rather than sung, sitting inside the noise instead of floating above it.^[6][7]

Compare that to the rest of the album, where melody leads and the production leaves room around each voice and instrument. Here there is no room. The arrangement is crowded in a way that mimics the feeling of being overwhelmed, and the brevity makes it feel like a spasm rather than a statement.

There is also a physical comedy to it. Giannascoli's homemade method means the harshness is not the result of a hardcore band thundering through a live room. It is one person with a guitar, a drum machine and a taste for distortion, and the gap between that modest setup and the violence of the result is part of the song's strange charm.^[1]

For anyone approaching the album for the first time, it is worth hearing "Brick" in sequence rather than alone. The shock is part of the design, and it lands hardest when the songs on either side of it have lulled you into expecting something kinder.

A short, blunt landmark

What "Brick" ultimately offers is a lesson in how Giannascoli works. He starts from sound, lets feeling arrive on its own schedule, and declines to hand over a key. The result is a song that is easy to describe and hard to explain, which may be exactly the condition he prefers. A brick is a simple thing until it is thrown, and then it is hard to think about anything else.