Bartees Strange grew up surrounded by fear—his family told cautionary tales as life lessons, and he turned to horror movies as a way to build resilience. For a young, queer, Black kid in rural America, fear wasn’t just an idea—it was reality. Horror, his latest album, is about confronting that fear head-on and transforming into someone powerful enough to be feared in return.
Co-produced by Strange alongside Yves and Lawrence Rothman (known for work with Yves Tumor and Lady Gaga) and Jack Antonoff, Horror is a fearless excavation of personal truth. Across its 12 tracks, Strange draws from the music that shaped his childhood—Parliament-Funkadelic, Fleetwood Mac, Teddy Pendergrass—fusing it with his love for hip-hop, country, indie rock, and house. The result is a genre-fluid, emotionally raw collection that refuses to be boxed in.
Since his breakthrough with 2022’s Farm to Table, Strange has toured with boygenius, Clairo, Dijon, and The National. His music has also found a home on screen, featured in Apple TV’s The New Look and A24’s I Saw the TV Glow.
Born in Ipswich, England to a military father and an opera-singer mother, Strange’s life has always been in motion. He eventually settled in Mustang, Oklahoma, and later immersed himself in the hardcore scenes of Washington D.C. and Brooklyn—all while working in the Obama administration and advocating for environmental justice. It’s this rich, layered history that fuels the complexity and urgency of Horror.
“If I can’t get an angle / Tell me, how am I supposed to feel?” Bartees Strange asks with a sense of unease on his new album Horror, out Friday via 4AD. But rather than offering a single perspective, Horror explores many. It’s a bold, multifaceted record—at times echoing Prince with slick, funk-laced guitars and syrupy vocals, at others evoking Bon Iver’s emotional range and sonic inventiveness.
“This album is just me trying to connect,” Strange has said. “I’m trying to shrink the size of the world. I’m trying to feel close—so I’m less afraid.” That desire for closeness threads through the album, even as it roams widely. On “Baltimore,” he weighs the idea of home, debating the merits of LA, NYC, DC, and Toronto. On the road again in “Lie 95,” he sings, “I been searching / for someone to love / now we’re folded / and I can’t get enough / I feel focused / On lifting you up.” Whether rooted in place or pulled by motion, Horror is about the emotional gravity of human connection.
