It’s Friday the 13th, and Bartees Strange has some thoughts on the 1980 slasher of that name. “I love that the mom is killing everyone,” he says, spoiling the movie for anyone who’s resided under a log for the past 45 years. “This kid [Jason] had disabilities and everyone’s making fun of him, and the mom is just so fed up, like, ‘I’m gonna take all these kids out.’”
A critically acclaimed alt-rock star who’s toured with acts like Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers (as memorably noted on his 2022 song “Cosigns”), Strange, 36, loves to catch up on horror movies in his downtime. If he shows you his extensive Letterboxd, you’ll see that they make up nearly all of his recent watches. And although he’s down with the chills and thrills, he’s really all about the humanity of the genre. Just take his POV on Jason Voorhees’ plight. As such, his third studio album, Horror — out Feb. 14 and co-produced by Jack Antonoff — is both an ode to scary movies and a look at his own life and background through that lens.
“I was always kind of a nervous kid,” he says, adding that he was one of the few Black people in the small Oklahoma town where his family lived. “I grew up with all the stories of my parents’ upbringing in the South, and they started to prepare me and my brother and sister for a similar life. I started watching horror movies as a way to train myself to be good at being scared. Then I fell in love with them.”
After seeing The Ring in theaters arguably too young, Strange threw himself into the horror realm, delighting in the slow, inexorable terror of 1978’s Halloween, the murderous entity surrounding premarital sex in 2014’s It Follows, the nuclear-family meltdown of 2018’s Hereditary, and the parallels he saw between his own life experiences and Get Out, director Jordan Peele’s 2017 tale of thinly veiled racist violence. “I feel like the best horror movies are the ones that speak to things that are scary within society,” he says. “I feel like records work in a similar way. Great records can be so tied to a time period that it almost defines it — or at least plays a part in the story of that time.” {read}