"I just don't really think about it. There's one part of me that's like why not just stay hungry the whole time and another part of me where maybe put out another record or two and maybe work outside and not think about the whole music machine. The whole social machine is really frustrating. The politics of friendship. There's that and then there's, why not keep hustling the whole time? You only get one."
Music is a compulsion for Giannascoli. A brilliant kid growing up in Havertown, Pennsylvania, he mostly coasted through school with top grades without having to dedicate his life to his studies. He worked on music instead, begging his parents for piano lessons in the third grade, moving into GarageBand compositions when they bought him a Mac at age 13, and moving towards a more recognizable 90s indie style as he grew through high school. His older siblings, Rachel and David, would pass music down to him—first the indie canon, then more niche local acts. Giannascoli still hangs on Rachel's word today. "My sister could show me the worst band and I would just like it," he tells me. "If she says it's good, then I think it's good."2010's RACE was an indie rock record with jagged compositional edges hidden beneath its lo-fi production; 2011's WINNER and the following year's RULES laid down what seemed like a blueprint, calling back to Pacific Northwest indie rock. It played out in a comfortably closed environment: a public endorsement came from Elvis Depressedly's Mat Cothran, local blogs picked up on the kid with the relentless release schedule and unkempt hair, but Giannascoli remained a cult, local songwriter. He was still a sophomore at Temple University when he released TRICK in 2012, an album that tampered with the format, skewing occasionally into gentle funk sounds and experimental electronics.
"Maybe it seems that way for a music person because typically I should be tripping acid and talking about space or something like that. I wouldn't consider myself more responsible than somebody else. Everyone thinks about this shit. But I'm still a flake. I'm trying to sing about some nature or aspect of my life."
Early last year, shortly before a show in London, Giannascoli received an email from Frank Ocean's manager, asking if he'd be interested in working on the follow-up to Channel Orange. This was when Ocean was still a recluse, teasing music and then retreating. Giannascoli met with him in London the next day and laid down some guitar tracks almost immediately. After that, he recorded contributions to what would become Endless and Blond, flying to Los Angeles from Philadelphia every couple of months. You can hear Giannascoli's guitar on Endless's "Slide on Me," "Rushes," and Wither; on Blond, he's present on "Self-Control" and "White Ferrari.""It was cool," he says now. "It was more like he had me just sit with his tracks and riff on them and come up with chord progressions and stuff. I shouldn't take much credit for it as far as finished product. It was all him. I just don't want people to think it's just me a Frank working on a song. He had me record a guitar and it's all his vision."Giannascoli's process on Rocket wasn't dissimilar. There are guest contributions from a handful of friends, something that Giannascoli has historically been extremely sparing with, preferring complete control. Ocean's role as orchestrator and inspiration—"He said 'do your thing' and he picked out what he liked," as Giannascoli puts it—opened up new possibilities.But there's more to it than process. In the middle of Rocket, immediately after the industrial brutality of "Brick," is "Sportstar." It bears all of Ocean's hallmarks: simple, descending piano chords; a gentle, pulsating bass drum beat; swirls of guitars in single-note distortion. Giannascoli's voice is auto-pitched up a couple octaves again. The verses call back to Ocean's Blond opener "Nikes," the non-verbal warbles only noticeable as voice not guitar on close inspection, just as they are on Ocean's "Pyramids."The characters are knotted together. In the verses, Giannascoli's protagonist is in thrall to someone else, accepting abuse: "Sportstar, If you want me, I'll call / If you want me to fall / I'll fall[…] Let me tie your Nikes." Eventually, it's explicit: "If you want to hurt me / Hurt me." But in the chorus, the song exhales and relaxes and a less distorted voice emerges, defiant and abrupt. The voice repeats the line: "I play how I wanna play / I say what I wanna say." On record, it sounds like the voice of the sportstar himself, echoing around the protagonist's head before he offers himself up. On "Sportstar," again, he's cut into two pieces: the "coolest person on earth" one moment, a transparent kid the next; certain of himself and then suddenly fearful. There's no resolution to "Sportstar," just an aphorism about death: "I don't wanna live long / Just strong."And that's just fine. With Rocket, Giannascoli has found a series of routes through the fear that everything has been done; the map he's drawn out has hundreds of roads, winding away in different directions; each of those paths leads somewhere new, somewhere he's yet to fully sketch out. The joy of following Giannascoli around this strange territory isn't found in the hope that he'll realize himself when he gets there or that he'll reconcile his disparate, conflicting personas—it's in the freedom he's found to veer off-course at all. We spend hours scrolling through our Facebook feeds, wondering why everyone else is a mile ahead of us in life; maybe that road isn't worth walking down at all. "I guess the hope is that people will like me or something," he tells me. "I feel like when I did it as a kid it was to be super personal and people would hear it and be, like, 'That's cool.'" He checks back on himself one last time; there's no need to figure that out just yet. "I don't know. Why the fuck would I do that?"Alex Robert Ross is also named Alex. Follow him on Twitter.Correction: This article originally stated that "Harvey" was on the album TRICK. It was on DSU. And on "Salt," Giannascoli sings "I want to fry," not "I want to fly."