Mac DeMarco Announces New Album Five Easy Hot Dogs

Mac DeMarco has announced a new album of instrumentals recorded on a 2022 road trip. He made Five Easy Hot Dogs during a jaunt from his Los Angeles hometown to a cabin in Utah, which he conceived as “kind of like being on tour, except there weren’t any shows, and [he’d] just be burning money.” The song titles correspond to the cities where they were made, and it arrives on January 20, with vinyl editions following on May 12. Check out the tracklist below.

DeMarco elaborated on the road trip in a press release: “Some places I stayed longer in than others, some of them I knew from the past, others not so much. I tried to keep things busy all the time. If I didn’t know what was up in a city, I’d just walk around ‘til someone recognized me and go from there. I met a lot of interesting people this way, and had a bunch of cool experiences.”

Of the cabin where he wound up, he added:

It probably could have slept about 20 people, but instead it was just me withdrawing from nicotine with a bunch of taxidermy animals all over the place. No other humans for probably 50 miles in any direction. Horrible idea. I lasted one night and went back to Los Angeles the next day,” he says. “When I first got back home, I felt as though I had given up on my idea and failed to finish what I was trying to do. But that’s all dog shit.

The nature of ripping around and recording and traveling in this manner doesn’t lend well to sitting around and planning or thinking about what it was that I was setting out to do. I didn’t ever have a sound in mind, or a theme or anything, I would just start recording. Luckily the collection of recordings from this period all shake hands, they have a present musical identity as a whole. I was in it while I was in it, and this is what came out of it, just the way it was.

This record sounds like what rolling around like that feels like. I hope you enjoy.