Harmless

That’s the tension running through By Them, By You, By Me, the new album from Mexico City–born, Los Angeles–based artist Nacho Cano, known as Harmless.

Written in the fallout of creative burnout and an industry that seemed to shift beneath his feet, Cano's record plays like a breakup with music itself. It's a candid portrayal of an artist searching for solid ground. It's also beautiful, like all great break-up records are.

In our conversation, Cano opens up about the complicated work of trying to reconnect with the thing that once defined him—and how it turned into the new Harmless album.

Analogue: I’ve been listening to the new singles, and what hits me is this sense of longing found in each one—a longing to understand what went wrong, to keep something together, to reconnect. Does that feel right to you?

Nacho Cano: Yeah, totally. And what’s funny is that the longing isn’t even about a person. It’s about a job. It’s about breaking up with your passion.

I wrote the record because it felt like the industry changed in the last five years in these wild, disorienting ways. When I came up, it was blogs, friends recommending stuff. There was this weird sense of longevity. Now it’s like: you blow up, or you disappear. Sometimes in six months. And it’s not even about music anymore; it’s about what a song does for the user.

It made me feel like this thing I loved the most—the thing that felt like a marriage, honestly—suddenly wasn’t what it was. So yeah, longing is the right word. I was longing to fall in love with music again, because it stopped feeling like love. It felt like I was separated from my passion, trying to figure out how to get back to it. Like, ‘Has anyone ever made a breakup album about their career?’ Because that’s basically what this is.

Analogue: You talk about the industry like a relationship, like it’s someone you have to contend with. Does it feel like that?

Nacho: Oh, 100 percent. Because when you break up with someone, you do all the same things. You don’t go online. You don’t want to see what they’re doing. Music is that for me. It’s like if “attention” were a person. You fight for it, and then when you stop fighting, it goes somewhere else, and you feel it.

You’re like, ‘Should I have hit the gym? Gone to therapy earlier?’ Which I did actually start going back to therapy. And then you see music being “happy” with other people, and you get salty. Or you talk to someone who’s “dating” music and doing really well, and they’re miserable too. And you’re like, ‘Oh, okay, maybe music was just as messed up with them as it was with me.’ That’s the headspace I was in writing all of this.

Analogue: How close were you to walking away from it entirely?

Nacho: Honestly? Really close. I didn’t tell the label I was making this record until it was almost done. I didn’t know if it was even for anyone else. I thought maybe it was just therapy, to make the angry, embarrassing album and then move on. I wasn’t trying to “stick the landing.” I wasn’t trying to be careful. It was more like sending that long breakup text where you don’t care if they reply. You just need them to know how you feel.

My last record was my Before Sunset, where I'm very naive and missing my plane because I love this girl. I'm gonna miss my plane. And then this record is ‘I am so upset. This marriage is hard. It's work.’ I don't know if that if that's too much, but, yeah…

Analogue: Now that the record exists and you’re on the other side of that emotional process, does anything feel resolved?

Nacho: I mean… not really. You don’t want to quit something you love. When music is good, it’s too good. And yeah, I’m married, and even if we had a rough year, I wouldn’t just say, ‘Well, that was rough, I’m out.’ You work through it. You talk. You hope something comes from honesty.

But music is also my job, which makes everything confusing. You want something back from it, something that says, ‘No, you’re not crazy. This is worth it.’ That could be anything: a good review, someone caring, something going viral, whatever. You just want proof.

I walked around LA yesterday listening to the record and I thought, ‘This is good.’ But immediately after that it was, ‘Why isn’t it what it should be? Why isn’t this relationship better? Why aren’t we ‘moving in together’?’ It’s stupid, but that’s where my brain goes. So I’m trying to not expect anything. But that’s hard when your passion is also how you survive.

Analogue: You’ve talked a lot about expectations. Could the work itself, and the fact that you made something you’re proud of, become the goal?

Harmless: I wish. That’s the problem. Because it really is like a relationship. If the relationship is rough, you’re like, ‘Well what else am I gonna do? This is my person.’ That’s how music feels. I have friends in film and TV going through the same mid-millennial thing. They built their lives around a passion, and now they’re like, ‘What do I do now?’ It’s scary.

And with music, you give and give and give. At some point you’re like, ‘Am I the fool here? Am I giving to something that isn’t giving back?’ That’s where this record came from: that exact question.

Analogue: What’s helped you stay grounded during all this, if anything?

Nacho: Honestly? I’ve just been treating it like a breakup. I got really into running. I started eating better. I lost weight. I travel more. I cleaned my whole studio like I was shifting the energy in a room. I started training for a half-Ironman. It all feels like that post-breakup surge where you’re like, ‘Okay, man, take care of yourself. Let’s figure out who you are without this.’

Analogue: With all that intensity, what’s the most satisfying musical moment for you on the record?

Nacho: There are a few. “The Real Thing” is probably the biggest one. That’s the only song on the record that isn’t about breaking up with music. It came from some family stuff—some hurtful, identity-related shit—and writing it was this way of saying, ‘I want to be the real thing to the people I thought were around me.’ And even aside from the meaning, it’s just a track. It hits.

“The Bluff” is another one where I genuinely don’t know how I pulled it off.

And the title track—“By Them, By You, By Me”—that one just… yeah. That’s the one where I sometimes tear up. It was the eve of my birthday. I love Slowdive, the Cranberries, that ’90s vibe. And there’s a line in there—“the one that was maybe too honest”—about wanting to go back to who I was before all this happened, before the person I became. Every time I hear it, I’m like, ‘Yep. Still feel that!’ Honesty feels rare right now. That’s why that song means so much.

VISIT: Harmless