John Maus releases his new album ‘Later Than You Think’ out through Young (Sep 26th). It’s a classic. New single Because We Built It out now. 

John Maus - Because We Built It (Official Video)

Later Than You Think:  
A Biography on John Maus 

A man stands alone, his long brown bangs drenched in sweat. He paces the stage, runs in place, tears at his hair, 
strikes himself with his microphone. Propelling bass, mechanical drums, and heavenly synths spill from the 
speakers around him. When he opens his mouth to sing, his eyes widen dramatically and the tendons in his neck 
strain with intensity, revealing — in all its authenticity — the “hysterical body.” The man is John Maus, a 
21st-century philosopher-musician who’s risen to mythic status in the last 20 years. His fierce belief in the 
emotional weight of sound, feeling deeply and thinking seriously, arrangements that sound as good at the club 
as they do at the symposium, bizzarro takes on popular music tropes, and legendary live shows have inspired 
legions of acolytes. His new album Later Than You Think, out September 26th via Young, is the clearest 
demonstration of this ethos to date. 

Maus’s intensity is not a persona. The man behind the mythos is just as passionate as the one behind the mic — 
brilliant, fixated, earnest to a fault, and full of deep insight that gushes out whenever he speaks. In his work and 
his words, he’s constantly fighting the status quo: the Mickey Mouse Club, Coca-Cola, and all the institutions 
that reduce culture to its lowest common denominator. Amid all this, he’s managed to infuse his music with a 
dark sense of humor. From imagining sex with cars in 2006 to deadpanning “Your pets are gonna die” 11 years 
later, his satiric imagination has always been embedded in his seemingly stern aesthetic. Great artists, after all, 
must avoid the pitfalls of taking themselves too seriously.

Between four revelatory albums, Maus wrote a book-length dissertation on communication technologies as 
mechanisms of societal control and built an arsenal of analog synths in his basement. These achievements were 
the product of deep struggle. “Can’t write a word so you lock yourself up / So they say you’re losing your 
mind,” he sings on Later Than You Think. It’s a creative block he used to endure every time he picked up a pen, 
“wearied and burdened and ridden around like a donkey with a bit in [his] mouth by a trillion demons,” as he 
told Henry Wallis on an enlightening episode of the Forms podcast. Embroiled in spiritual battle — between the 
perfect and the good, but also between good and evil — he eventually found a path forward. But to understand 
Maus’s path to salvation, we must first know his road to rock bottom.