“No Soldier” opens Alex Cameron’s fifth album in a cacophonous wash of reverb, a vision of samsara narrated by a failing movie star. Its washed-up actor narrator gained a lot of weight for a role he never got. The critics hate him, and the people online hate him more. He is always late to set. Why hurry, he asks, when the world is ending anyway?
The hyper-specific self-pity then gives way to describing “children turned to fire by the wind”. Who among us can blame him for refusing to soldier for that world, or even just for running behind? It will happen sooner or later, he insists. That is overdramatic, but is it untrue? That is left to us to figure out, along with whether this man is just a narcissist, an incurable layabout, or simply honest. The song never resolves it; it only startles you into playing it again. It is a striking, anthemic opener.
Over 13 years and five LPs, Cameron has emerged as the patron bard of the failed and failing, equally sincere and satirical, and careful never to reveal where one ends and the other begins. Nearly every song arrives from inside the head of a grifter, a hustler or some other casualty of a game rigged against them, someone liable to turn up with blood on their knuckles and money in the trunk.
For most of his career it has been easy, or maybe just sort of fun, to picture the Australian songwriter sketching these subjects from across the room, tilting the page away so no one catches him at it. That reading is a silly oversimplification. Underneath the lurid tales, Cameron is a genuine craftsman, closer to Randy Newman than his synthesizers might suggest. He builds hummable, formally impeccable songs around narrators you would cross the street to avoid, and trusts you to tell them apart from the man who writes them.
The gift is rare enough to have earned him admirers in high places. Some know him best as a sometime co-writer for the Killers, or from the tours he has run alongside Mac DeMarco and Angel Olsen, or, this fall, as the opener for the Strokes across the UK and Europe.
Alex Cameron’s subject has always been failure. What is different about Late to Set is how many angles of it he finds, and how few of them he needs to explain. That may be a function of where the songs began. Cameron spent 2022 through 2025 writing screenplays nobody bought, lost them in the January 2025 Los Angeles fires, and built the record out of the wreckage on a California avocado ranch. The story sounds too good to check.
What gets overlooked is that Cameron’s best songs are not character studies at all. They are emotional parables. Late to Set strikes his best balance yet between evocative detail and withheld explanation, close enough to produce a pang of recognition and never close enough to settle the matter.
The album returns to the sparer style of Cameron’s earliest records after the lushness of 2022’s Oxy Music. The production, by Mark Perkins, Zach Dawes, Maxim Ludwig and others, leaves far more room for Cameron’s delivery to carry the weight, a shift that becomes immediately apparent on “Statue Down”, an off-kilter pop ballad with an earworm chorus. The album’s first single is literally about tearing statues down, and perhaps not only the kind you no longer want to pay to keep clean.
This sounds heady, but it never feels that way, because Cameron can always be depended on not to lose track of what makes a pop song fun. His melodies dip and rise and catch. He builds tension, teases it, releases it, and sometimes flatly denies it. The effect is nowhere more pronounced than on “Stand-In Man”, the album’s standout if someone were to force me to choose. It is a stripped-down, swoon-worthy boogie with real sensual heft and rhythmic contours that arch and break. Its narrator is the titular stand-in, and he seems, against everything we might expect, like a pretty good guy.
“Violent Man” closes the album by collapsing the distance between its narrator and its listener. As the song builds, background vocals begin chanting “ultraviolence”, summoning Anthony Burgess’ monster Alex, a boy who loves two things: the music of Ludwig van and gratuitous brutality.
Burgess asked whether violence could be conditioned out of a person. Cameron’s narrator settles for keeping it submerged with Lexapro, but anything that can be submerged is still very much there. Violence is less a category than a condition of being here, and nobody has yet explained why some of us act on a capacity we all supposedly share while others never do.
Cameron points toward the same mystery in the press notes, citing Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham’s Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Bonobos share unexpected windfalls, even if it’s just an empty box. Chimpanzees kill over them. Human beings share DNA with both.
Late to Set‘s nine songs are bigger, stranger, and more forgiving than anything Alex Cameron has written, and he makes every one of them swing. They will make you cackle in one breath and wince in the next. Their meanings remain productively unsettled, but the recognition they provoke never does. That is left to us to figure out.