Looking for something to believe in with Emperor X

I go through phases of deleting TikTok from my phone, re-downloading it, and then deleting it again. During one of my recent returns to the app, my For You Page fed me a video of someone dancing and lip-synching to Emperor X’s “Erika Western Teleport,” the centerpiece of one of his wordy, lo-fi slacker rock albums—one I had in heavy rotation during my college years. I chalked it up as one of those moments when the algorithm knew me better than I wanted to admit, but when I clicked on the audio tag, I found roughly one and a half thousand videos—fit checks and fan-cams and photo-dumps of everything from people’s pets to their European vacations, all set to this mechanical folk song that sketches heartbreak through vague allusions to 1980s computer software and Battlestar Galactica. 

When I mention this to Chad R. Matheny, the intimidatingly prolific singer, songwriter, and vocalist who performs under the Emperor X moniker, he’s shocked and delighted, having been completely oblivious to his song’s viral moment. He has no idea how it happened, but theorizes that young adults who’d come of age in an irony-saturated social media landscape are “sick of the goofs,” and in search of art that gives them permission to express themselves without layers upon layers of detachment and plausible deniability. 

“I think they’re genuinely looking for something to believe in,” he says, and one of the places they’re seeking that out is in art that is unabashedly sincere. He suspects that’s why his fanbase has skewed younger in recent years. “I had a little wave of interest in my music that spiked around 2020, 2021, and it was a wave of young people, so I realized, ‘Man, I need to understand what’s happening.” This led Matheny to certain right-wing podcasts, driven by morbid curiosity and a desire to understand what ills the younger generation is up against. “Knowing about things like that helps me when I talk to young folks because I know what they’re up against and how grim that is.” He mentions Lex Fridman’s podcast in particular, calling Fridman and the AI advocates he interviews “misanthropes” with “a dim view of what it’s like to be a human.” Amidst all this, though, is an air of genuine, empathetic interest in understanding how a person can get to a place where they view their own humanity and the humanity of others as disposable: “They think AI is going to replace us—and that that’s a good thing.” 

Matheny joins me via Zoom from Berlin, where he emigrated from the U.S. over a decade ago, and where he owns and operates an independent music venue. “I’m really proud of the music venue because I feel like it’s a way that I’ve taken the minimal success of my music—which I’m also proud of—and funneled it into creating a more stable thing so other people can have a better chance of making that happen with their music too.” He hosts open mic nights, which he describes as “sort of like church” and himself as “the weird agnostic youth pastor”—an unsurprising designation from a songwriter penning lines like, “Our God is an awesome God to hang with / My pastor told me God said I was cool.” It’s one of many identifiers Matheny reaches for during our conversation: a progressive, a pluralist, someone who comes into contact with a lot of people who are both idealistic and grumpy but doesn’t consider himself either of those things. “It’s easy to be a grumpy idealist in 2026. If we weren’t grumpy, something would be wrong. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, because I’m not grumpy.” He’s quite chipper throughout our conversation, with seemingly boundless curiosity about the human condition and an ability to find insight into it through nearly any channel, no matter how quotidian or esoteric.

Matheny is in the process of completing a master’s in the philosophy of science. This interview is one method of procrastination—he’s putting off finishing his thesis on audio mastering, which, in short, argues that “we’ve created a scientific language around music that intimidates people and makes music boring.” 

“There’s a standard that streaming platforms want you to hit—negative 14 LUFS, plus or minus,” he explains. “They call it replay gain, comparative loudness, dynamic range limitation. These are phrased as if they’re technical, so they’ll say, ‘Of course the human mind responds best when…” and then they’ll say this very specific thing. What I’m writing about is the fact that they don’t have the warrant to say that, because the research we’ve done about perception is zero. We know what the mind does, we know what an MRI says when you listen to something, but no one really knows what the internal experience of hearing music is, let alone applying standards to it as if they know how that impacts people.” At the end of the day, it’s the enforcement of an arbitrary aesthetic standard disguised as technical necessity.

He brings up the remastered version of Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted as an example: “That album sounded terrible prior to 2008, and now it sounds fine, and I loved it before. That album’s supposed to hurt! It hurts to hear, and that’s part of the experience of it. The engineer was on some kind of drugs, and you’re shaving off the edges if you change it.” He’s right—Slanted and Enchanted is supposed to crunch through the wires and hit your ears with a cheap, scrappy urgency. It’s a hallmark of Matheny’s own music. Emperor X’s records have always sounded distinctly analog, and his forthcoming twelfth studio album, Unified Field, is no exception. The songs are scratchy and abrasive, highlighting Matheny’s dense, acutely specific lyricism and raw vocal delivery as the focal point. 

“We should be more open-minded before we put a beautiful piece of artwork through a sausage grinder and make it flat,” is how he sums up his thesis, before humbling it, and himself: “It’s a call for moderation in the use of LUF standards. I think it’s gonna get maybe a C or a C+. No one’s gonna like it.” From the way he talks about his schoolwork and venue, Matheny seems to have found a creative freedom in Berlin that might not have been available to him in the United States. Much of that freedom, he says, is financial—and he credits Germany’s robust public arts funding. I don’t think there’s anything in the European character that makes them more likely to be open-minded,” Matheny says. “I think they just built a better system here, and you see that in the survival of more weird art.” Collectivism in American art and music scenes is, in his experience, born of necessity more often than infrastructure. “There’s something to be said for adversity. The fact that the arts are so downtrodden [in America] means people really do have to rely on each other more. At least that’s what it was like when I lived there.”

He jokes about wanting to be “the Gertrude Stein of an imagistic avant-garde folk punk scene that doesn’t exist yet,” though it seems like he is, in fact, building the scene he’d like to see in the world. “It’s an insanely arrogant thing to say, but you’ve gotta dream, right?” It’s when Matheny’s tone skews ironic or irreverent that he sounds the most sincere—a mainstay of his music as well as his conversation style. Borderline parody is often his entryway into decidedly unironic protest music; the characters who populate his songs rage against machines like the Tesla Cybertruck and liberate prophecy-delivering exotic birds from captivity in often futile attempts to restore a tiny bit of justice in a world whose cruelty they’re unable to fathom. 

Despite Matheny being a longtime expat, many of the protest songs on Unified Field are distinctly American. He’s grateful for his ability to write about American politics as a now-outsider. He says that the distance from American exceptionalism has offered some perspective, even as he accepts that he’ll always carry the baggage of being culturally American, since he didn’t immigrate until well into adulthood. “I do kind of believe in the national project of America in its most idealistic sense,” he admits, “as expressed with like, NASA or the Civil Rights legislation of the sixties—the idea of America that never was actually real, but the idea of it is still something that appeals to me and something that I could get behind if it ever were on offer, which I don’t think it is.” 

He mentions this while we’re talking about his song “Praise Jesus! Hail Reagan!”—a fairly straightforward and at times cynical protest song critiquing xenophobia and fundamentalist Christian hypocrisy. “It’s ironic in a lot of ways, and it’s critical, and it protests the treatment of migrants, but there’s this hint that I think a lot of people miss,” Matheny says. “Like, yes, Christian Nationalists are confused about their faith, but we are too, as leftists. I do think it’s important to have an ideal to strive for, even while at the same time, making sure to never be lulled into the idea that you’ve reached it.”

Maybe we could all use a little of that ‘grumpy idealism’ Matheny was talking about earlier. “What’s emerging, I think, is a common consensus idea that we don’t like the concentration of power. And when I say ‘we,’ I mean the people who aren’t billionaires.” The day that Matheny and I spoke, Elon Musk became the first trillionaire in human history. There’s a small, sad comfort in knowing that even the richest man in the world still seems desperate to be seen as a cool, interesting tastemaker. “The reason I have faith,” Matheny says. “Not in any particular thing that’s gonna happen, but in humans in general, because I think guys like [Musk]—there’s a limit to what they can do. He would laugh at me for saying that, like, ‘What are you talking about? I’ve got a trillion dollars!’ You can’t make people care.” Maybe that’s all anyone can strive for as they stumble towards something resembling progress—to make people care.

Unified Field is out today on Bar/None.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.

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