John Maus

John Maus (born February 23, 1980) is an American composer, singer, and songwriter known for his baritone singing style and his use of vintage synthesizer sounds and medieval music church modes, a combination that often draws comparisons to 1980s goth-pop. His early lo-fi music recordings anticipated and inspired the late 2000s hypnagogic pop movement. and had what he described as a "spoiled ass" upbringing. performed in punk bands, and created music with his computer. He said that he began playing an instrument "around 12 or 13" and remembered that "the [only] culture I was exposed to was what was coming through MTV, Top 40 radio and maybe a classic rock station or something like that. ... I lived out in a very small town, with no boutique record stores and no college kids." Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" created "a fascination for musical details" for him, and when he got his first bass guitar, "I didn’t take any lessons or learn how to play it. I’d just kind of pluck on the bass and scream my heart out." Afterward, he became fascinated with the life and music of Syd Barrett, and recorded his own version of Barrett's 1970 song "Feel" from The Madcap Laughs. and "my very first fan", and in turn, Maus called him "the zeitgeist embodied. He is the figure of this situation and of this time, of the cloud, of the spectacle gone online."

After Maus and Rosenberg became roommates, Maus recorded the material from his first album using a cassette multi-track recorder and an early 1990s synthesizer soundbank. They collaborated on the title track of Rosenberg's Lover Boy (2002). Maus had also self-released CD-Rs of his work, Sometimes Maus was also the opening act for these shows.

After Love Is Real, Maus was awarded a scholarship to study political philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi, where he had a day job as a lecturer. In the evenings, he continued working on music from his office. In 2009, Maus relocated from Hawaii to a secluded cabin in Minnesota, where he struggled to write material for a third album. He said that he eventually gave up, and instead began "doing lots of chemistry projects and chromatography experiments. I set myself on fire a few times heating inflammable solvents."

2012–present Maus envisioned that after he completed his PhD dissertation, he would return to teaching, stating in 2011 that he could not foresee a career in music. At the same time, he started experimenting with recreational drugs for the first time in his life, "going into sensory deprivation tanks and just trying any trick I could think of. I became solely obsessed with this at the expense of anything else." From 2012 to 2016, he did not release any new music, and spent the majority of the time in isolation. Two years were devoted to finishing his dissertation, while another two were spent learning how to build modular synthesizers. Completed and submitted in 2014, the 338-page thesis "Communication and Control" discussed the influence of technology on social control, and he was thereby awarded his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaiʻi, where his thesis advisor was Michael J. Shapiro. He immediately started building the instruments that were ultimately used for the recording of his next album.

His fourth official album, Screen Memories, was released on October 27, 2017. It was followed by Addendum on April 20, 2018. In an October 2017 interview, Maus indicated a desire to record an album with Rosenberg: "We’re both swamped right now ... but I've been talking about it for a long time, and he's been talking about it. It’s just a question of finding the right moment, which I think will be after this." To support Screen Memories and Addendum, he embarked on his first solo tour with a live band, featuring his brother Joe Maus on bass, Minneapolis musician Luke Darger on keyboards, and Jonathan Thompson on drums. The remaining dates were immediately cancelled. Later in the year, Maus resumed touring without his backing band.

Since then, Maus has played occasional gigs, including a November 2021 performance at the music festival Substance in Los Angeles. Maus had invited Ariel Pink to be his sound engineer for this performance; however, one of the festival promoters recommended against this out of fear of controversy. According to Pink, Maus, who would have protested out of principle, went ahead with the performance due to financial troubles. Pink recalled, "I said, I’ll pay you the money. I know they’re not paying you that much." He and Maus have not spoken since.

In July 2023, George Clanton's ElectroniCON 2023 music festival removed Maus from their line up following complaints on social media and from other scheduled performers. Maus donated his cancellation fee to social justice charities (Hope Not Hate & The Trevor Project) and, in a subsequent statement, apologized for unintentionally making "the ElectroniCON artists & fans feel unsafe". In 2024, Maus completed a sold out European tour consisting of 43 dates. In June 2025, Maus announced his sixth studio album Later Than You Think, set for release on September 26 of that year, and also announced the 'American Pilgrimage' tour.

Style and philosophy Performances and rhetoric

On stage, Maus is known for his intense displays of emotion while performing. The Guardian noted him as a "ferocious theoretician" who "pogos, head-bangs and gives vent to a succession of feral howls as he jack-knifes at the waist." Until 2017, he only performed one-man "karaoke shows" in which he sang over prerecorded music. The BBC's Charles Ubaghs distinguished Maus as "a serious believer in pop music. ... Behind these retro overtones is a desire to explore our modern relationships with pop, and its impact on our wider philosophical and cultural lives."

Maus relates his erratic stage demeanor to "the hysterical body". Accordingly, the purpose of the display is to combat the "play-acting" involved with live music and affect more sincerity in the performance. This ties in with the idea meant by "we must become the pitiless censors of ourselves".

In various interviews, Maus advocates for "truth" in music. Another example he gives to describe the reduction is "it sounds like x and y". He adds that the "truth content of any work, I suppose, is the extent to which it accomplishes something else than what it is." According to Maus, he does not think about aesthetic theory when "working over the keyboard, or musing over musical ideas in my head. But when discussing it, we want to have some new thought about this new music. I wouldn't claim that my music is new, but generally speaking pop music begs for some kind of radical new way of talking about it." He also denies any intention for his work to come off as "a sneering take on pop." His compositions tend to employ the use of particular modal scales previously associated with Renaissance and medieval music, which he believes is often mistaken as an attempt to evoke the 1980s.

His baritone singing style is often compared to Ian Curtis of Joy Division. Maus responded that he was not aware of Joy Division until much later in his life and that any similarities are likely due to Curtis sharing "the same heroes as me, like Jim Morrison."

During Maus' hiatus in the 2010s, various contingents of popular music began indulging in throwbacks to 1980s culture. Maus acknowledged that his early albums may have anticipated this development.

Asked about current events in a 2018 interview, Maus criticized the American left-wing as inferior to its European counterpart, saying that the former advances "ideas that are so quaint and old fashioned and inadequate to our situation. You know, asking for more rights, and individual liberty, I mean what is this? 1776?" He added that the Occupy Wall Street movement was "the closest" he had ever aligned with contemporary American politics and that there had been a growing hysteria to "call somebody alt right or something but there has been a far left critique of identity politics in as much as it plays the game of identity and identity is always something that can be put to work by the mechanisms that serve only toward anyone other than us y'know?"

Views on Donald Trump In January 2021, Maus, alongside Ariel Pink, attended the pro-Donald Trump protests that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. Responding to controversy regarding his presence at the event, Maus tweeted a quote from Mit brennender Sorge, a 1937 encyclical from Pope Pius XI distributed privately among clergy, that condemned aspects of nazism, does not mention National Socialism, Hitler or the Nazi Party itself—but obliquely references them. On 23 December 2021, Pink later appeared on alt-right podcast Wrong Opinion, discussing with host Josh Lekach that he was working closely with Maus on music and merchandise, saying "John is one thousand and one percent on Team Trump".

After a fan requested further explanation, he replied with an image of Edith Stein, a German-Jewish philosopher and Catholic nun who was executed at Auschwitz II-Birkenau by Nazis in 1942. Maus also stated that he responded directly to people who had messaged him stating that he was at the event for a joke.

On March 27, 2025, Maus spoke about his involvement in January 6, 2021 riots, on the Forms Podcast, claiming that he, his wife and Ariel were invited by filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer to Washington, D.C. as he and Ariel Pink were going to score the music for the film TFW No GF. He stated that when they were in their hotel, in D.C., Moyer stated that something was occurring at the Capitol and invited Maus and his wife to go down and get shots with Moyer and her cameraman, where they witnessed people climbing the wall and then went back to their hotel, stating that Ariel was not present at the event.

Maus stated that later that night after news of the killing of Ashli Babbitt, people started to question why Maus was present at the event, so "with burning concern" he posted the Pope Pius XI encyclical, "mistakenly thinking, you know, that the paragraphs condemning the exhultation and divinization of race and blood and nation were clear enough about where I stood". Maus also stated that he tried to respond individually to some DMs stating that he did not support it, but that looking back at the event thought that he was not clear enough and did not do enough to rebuff the allegations.

Personal life According to Maus in 2010, he had been diagnosed "with everything at one point or another. They say you're bipolar or whatever, but I've never had one of those ... euphoric, manic episodes where I had an exaggerated perception of my own ability, that would be wonderful. But no, I guess depression, or stuff like that." When asked if he had autism, he responded: "No, no, no, no, I only… I don't put much stock in those clinical categorizations in general, I suppose." He is Catholic.

Discography

Official studio albums + Title Release Songs Released: March 20, 2006 Label: Upset the Rhythm Love Is Real Released: November 19, 2007 Label: Upset the Rhythm We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of OurselvesReleased: June 27, 2011 Label: Ribbon Music, Upset the Rhythm Screen MemoriesReleased: October 27, 2017 Label: Ribbon Music AddendumReleased: April 20, 2018 Label: Ribbon Music Later Than You ThinkReleased: September 26, 2025 Label: Young

Compilation + Title Release A Collection of Rarities and Previously Unreleased Material Released: July 12, 2012 Label: Ribbon Music

Early unofficial albums 1999: Snowless Winters EP (Demonstration Bootleg) 2000: Love Letters from Hell (Demonstration Bootleg) 2003: Second Album EP (Demonstration Bootleg) 2003: I Want to Live (Demonstration Bootleg)