Mac DeMarco album review, ‘Here Comes the Cowboy’: Indie-rock poster boy sounds like he can’t be bothered

For the best part of a decade, Mac DeMarco has been searching for inner peace, while giving the distinct impression that he wouldn’t know what to do if he found it. He’s a downbeat charmer, with enough wry humour and melancholic self-awareness to seduce both fans and critics.

But Here Comes the Cowboy, his fourth and worst album, trades inward curiosity for despondency. Always exquisitely unbothered, the indie-rock poster boy now sounds like he can’t be bothered.

As if to forestall a backlash, DeMarco has spent considerable energy tamping down expectations around the record. “I’m in a place right now where I just don’t care,” the 29-year-old told Huck magazine. “I assumed this record would pop up, fly under the radar, maybe some people listen to it. I’m totally fine with that.”

Maybe it helps, when your hobby is now your job and your job has sent you spiralling into existential unrest, to imagine the process can be reversed. That a return to innocent creativity is as simple as moving to LA, writing increasingly anonymous ballads and releasing them on an imprint called Mac’s Record Label.

But the evidence across Here Comes the Cowboy – in the plodding McCartney-Lennonisms of “Skyless Moon” and the formulaic “All of Our Yesterdays” – is that DeMarco is lost. Marquee songs like “Finally Alone” remain undeniable, resplendent with guitar doodles and DeMarco’s casually soul-searching drawl, but there is no longer an alluring mope at the centre of it all.

DeMarco opens the album by repeating the title, deadpan, over a rudimentary blues riff, like Jonathan Richman winding up a hostile audience. Stoned funk jamboree “Choo Choo” is so dull, the weed industry ought to distance itself in a press release.

Brooding single “Nobody” at least alludes to the record’s spiritual murk. Disenchanted with life as a public figure, the narrator paints himself as a “creature on television” preaching a cause he no longer believes in. Whether he holds the media responsible, blames his own creative stasis or our celebrity culture’s treatment of entertainment figures, who knows. The song seems designed for a puddle-deep documentary sequence subtitled: “Mac grapples with his identity.”

There are life rafts. “K” is straightforwardly lovely, the latest in a series of paeans to his long-term partner. The ineffable “On the Square” draws you into his black hole of reflection, rather than presenting it through a telescope.

DeMarco specialises in beige nihilism, and he can make it sound wonderful. There’s poignancy in the vision of a ruined dreamer grasping around in the gutter and pulling out fistfuls of melodic gold.

The fact that the singer, far from being a doomed nobody, has benefited massively from this underdog archetype – that it’s precisely his boilerplate slackerdom and boyish ennui that have attracted a vast audience of the pseudo-disenfranchised – takes nothing away from his most beautiful songs.

But now he is coasting, on idly Mac DeMarco-esque hooks and on the cachet of his supposedly relatable character. The image he’s selling – the chill tunesmith in yesterday’s boxers – demands resistance to change. It’s a reality he knows well, but judging by the disappointing Here Comes the Cowboy, he seems unsure what to do about it.

Once the toast of slackers everywhere, DeMarco has never sounded more ambivalent, ready to close his eyes and slink back into obscurity.