We’ve all done it. You go online to listen to a song or watch a video — and the next thing you know, it’s hours later and you’ve gone down some sort of a bizarre rabbit hole that’s taken you light-years from where you started. That might very well be how you’ll feel when you get to the end of A. G. Cook’s imposing but impressive 7G. The producer, label head, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and sometime singer’s debut release is a sprawling seven-disc, 49-song fever-dream deep-dive through a bottomless well of sounds and styles — from electronica to pop to metal to punk to IDM to folk to experimental soundscapes to mad-scientist revamps of songs by Blur, Smashing Pumpkins, Taylor Swift, The Strokes, Tommy James and a crapload more. Massive and meandering, admittedly disjointed but never dull, it’s more or less the equivalent of taking a hefty dose some serious psychotropic drugs, firing up your favourite music-streaming service, hitting shuffle and going with the flow for 159 minutes. If you haven’t done that lately, well, it’s probably high time.
THE PRESS RELEASE: “PC Music has announced 7G, a 49-track album by A. G. Cook, split across seven discs each dedicated to a different instrument: Drums, Guitar, Supersaw, Piano, Nord, Spoken Word and Extreme Vocals. The album includes a wealth of new material, as well as covers of songs by Blur, Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, The Strokes, The Smashing Pumpkins, Tommy James and the Shondells, Life Sim and Sia. It also includes vocal contributions from Caroline Polachek, Tommy Cash, Hannah Diamond, Cecile Believe and Alaska Reid. A. G. Cook is best known as the founder and head of PC Music, and has spent recent years working in creative partnerships with artists, most notably Charli XCX, for whom he was Executive Producer on her albums How I’m Feeling Now (Mercury Prize nominated), Charli, Number 1 Angel and Pop 2; Cook is also the Executive Producer for Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi’s forthcoming new album. 7G is the first new Cook release under his own name since 2019’s Lifeline single.”
