Mac DeMarco: Dog on the Rock / Seven Off the Two / Seaplane Dog / The View from Tian Tan

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1 of 4Dog on the RockDotsMac’s Record LabelDots2026

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Genre:

Rock

Release Date:

2026

Mac DeMarco grins to the camera as he scrolls through his endless archive of demos, voice memos, and tossed-off beats, pulling one up at random. The music that seeps through the speakers is lite funk rock, undoubtedly influenced by the Japanese pop artists DeMarco has long cribbed from. “Just garbage,” he chuckles, but nearly 5 million people seem to disagree, to the point of concern for his standards or even his mental health. The beat slaps! How could he dismiss it?

It’s instructive, upon listening to Mac DeMarco’s four new surprise releases from late last month, to think about what he doesn’t consider garbage—what he considers worthy of curation on these neatly wrapped packages, each one a little bouquet of spare ideas and two-bit beats that apparently mean something to him when considered together. The beat from the video eventually ended up on his 199-track archive-clearing One Wayne G in 2023, but that was a deliberately formless work. The four new albums, initially released as tour-only CD-Rs and unceremoniously dumped on streaming, all vary in length between 24 and 41 minutes and are grouped together not just by the time they were recorded (the track titles are mostly timestamps) but by, well, a certain something.

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Seven Off the Two is the one that keeps drifting through my mind. One of the shorter albums at 24 minutes, it was apparently recorded around Thanksgiving 2025 and features cover art of a spectacular buck with an impressive set of antlers—the kind of animal a road warrior like DeMarco might relate to as instinctively as he would a fictional wild thing like Bobby Dupea. The opening track, a drum solo that comprises a third of the album, could be seen as a simple indulgence: DeMarco’s version of “Moby Dick” or “Toad,” or maybe just a recording of him practicing. Either way, you can hear it as the most experimental and patience-testing thing ever to appear on a Mac DeMarco album, something just as untamed and unbeholden to human virtues as the beast on the cover.

Maybe I’m just getting dreamy off the basis of the cover, but when you’re culling from an archive of work that varies widely in quality, curation is the name of the game. I keep thinking of a description of Bob Dylan by Roger Ebert, who spent decades despising the singer-songwriter, not least in his intractable 2003 film Masked & Anonymous: “There is the assumption that he cannot be performing to entertain us, and that therefore there must be a deeper purpose.” But isn’t that the leap of faith all listeners take when confronted with art that doesn’t immediately satisfy their needs? Part of me wants to dismiss DeMarco’s new work as a case of an artist putting a bow on trash. Yet a romantic voice keeps calling out, one that wants to give DeMarco the benefit of the doubt and glean something sacred in these seasick bundles of songs.

It may be found in the uniformly slow tempos, which have been a hallmark of his work since 2019’s beleaguered Here Comes The Cowboy. There’s a persistent sense of fatigue in this music, and though it’s “chill” in a Jimmy Buffett tropical hangover sort of way, it’s too much of a bummer to sound like lo-fi beats. It doesn’t feed you good feelings, and that’s the difference between this music and the funk beat Mac pulled up on his computer. It forces you to live in the headspace of a touring musician, someone who’s candidly chronicled how his line of work has made him gross and rough, whose addictions to alcohol and cigarettes have been more than just a subtext in his songs. It’s no coincidence that Five Easy Hot Dogs, the first of this seemingly lower-stakes canon of instrumental albums, was recorded during the road trip where DeMarco quit smoking.

This music was largely made during a few short breaks in DeMarco’s touring schedule following the release of last year’s subdued and subtly excellent vocal album, Guitar. It’s siesta music, but the way the beats bleed together not just from song from song but album to album suggests a kind of low-level anhedonia: a sense that no matter how much fun he has taking his dog on a seaplane or visiting far-flung corners of America, things don’t feel quite as new as they used to, and memories manifest as fuzzy blurs of vaguely felt experiences rather than a clear vision in the mind.

Maybe it’s because of age, maybe it’s because of the self-induced brain- and body-frying DeMarco’s chronicled since his early cigarette songs. The screwed-down tempo of his recent work would seem to suggest that something fundamentally cracked within the physical body of the entire Mac DeMarco project around Cowboy: a slacker-rock equivalent of Leyland Kirby giving his Caretaker project dementia. This lingering tinge of post-adolescent regret—of feeling you’re aging the wrong way—is so much of the reason listeners flock to DeMarco’s music in the first place, and it comes across as sharply in these four albums as anything he’s ever made.

In order to squeeze these feelings out of the music, you have to contend with the actual sound of it, and it’s here that a lot of the people bemused by his “Garbage Funk” video would most likely drop out. At least half of the music collected across these four albums’ combined two hours features DeMarco scatting in the raspy falsetto he started leaning into heavily on Cowboy, and though there’s a wistful quality to these wordless vocals, it’s a tough sound to spend even short periods of time with. This is probably how DeMarco sketches out melodic ideas before the words come into place, but as a vocal improviser, he’s no Betty Carter.

Dog on the Rock is the only one of these releases that didn’t make me feel anything numinous. It’s 38 minutes of scatting and near-interchangeable instrumentals, superlative only as the least interesting. The View From Tian Tan is like an extension of the place-based suites on Five Easy Hot Dogs, occasionally making use of a synth preset that sounds like the light thunk of a bamboo mallet. Inspired by a giant Buddha statue in Hong Kong that DeMarco must’ve seen on tour, it’s the only one of these without the scatting, which means it’s the album I’d recommend most readily. But it feels safe without any rough edges, less possessed by the melancholy DeMarco evokes so easily.

Seaplane Dog is the most substantial of the four releases: At 41 minutes, it’s longer than most of his studio albums. If DeMarco had released it as the follow-up to Guitar, it might be perceived as his Self-Portrait, a daffy and frustrating collection that nonetheless adds up to an honest and representative portrait of the artist’s mindset at a certain time. It’s the only one to feature any songs, namely “Madam Crown,” an ode to a woman’s healing hospitality in the vein of the Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek,” and “Wave Goodbye” (no relation to Ty Segall’s blues-punk masterpiece), which greets someone who seems headed for the same downward slope DeMarco was on about a decade ago. Mac seems to have had access to a piano during the time he made these recordings, and some of these demos gesture towards the faded boardwalk grandeur of 2015’s Another One, an almost Beach Boys-like vibe he hasn’t explored much recently.

It’s now clear that DeMarco’s diaristic recordings, demarcated by the date-and-time song titles, form a separate wing of his catalog apart from his singer-songwriter work. They’re a different project in the same medium under the same name, one that essentially amounts to a real-time documentation of the singer’s life. That’s an inherently awesome undertaking in its own right, even if none of the music has proven to be particularly essential thus far. These four albums are the definition of fans-only releases, not least because it might take a fan to understand how potently the feelings conveyed in his best work carry over even to scrappy demos such as these.