On CAFE PARADISO, Mykki Blanco is completely reborn, trading the persona-driven theatrics of his previous releases for something more interior and exacting. The record draws from the diverse, banal and yet idiosyncratic contexts of the artist’s life in transit: “...shitty Wall Street lunch counters and an endless stream of dive bars in the East Village” in New York; “...drinking beer and playing pool in Belleville; the drink that lasts forever at La Chope des Artistes and Chez Jeanette” in Paris; and “languishing for hours at the tea houses or Café Hafa” in Tangier. From these fragments, CAFE PARADISO assembles a soundtrack for the contemporary, queer flâneur, moving through spaces where being alone does not necessarily mean being lonely. “CAFE PARADISO is a record for artsy kids,” Blanco explains, “for my cosmopolitan aesthetes to sit alone in a café and work on crafting the life of their dreams, or just make sense of it!” When asked which earlier versions of himself appear here, Blanco is unequivocal: “None.”

If Blanco’s discography exists less as a linear evolution and more as a series of deliberate mutations — each project shifting in terms of tone, genre, and even the function of the voice — then CAFE PARADISO represents his post-rumspringa clarity. “I love creating music but I’ve never liked the idea of being a one-trick pony,” Blanco explains, “I need to check some things off my ‘Life List.’” After his 2022 album Stay Close to Music and the Postcards from Italia (2023) EP, Blanco spent two years at art school in Switzerland, getting his MFA and deepening his studio practice as a visual artist. “I’ve got a lot of ideas for interdisciplinary projects,” Blanco says, “and I felt the experience helped me level up in other areas of my career and expand my database of knowledge which just ends up making everything I produce even cooler.

The lead single “Little Feet” (featuring Ian Isiah and Breakaway) sets the tone for the record as a score for the “wayward metropolitan,” to use the artist's own words. Blanco and his collaborators purr about hanging out, hooking up, and dancing the night away under the street lights over a sultry, nostalgic groove that feels both familiar and slightly unreal.

On the second single, the provocative party anthem “Butt Sex,” Blanco calls all his “baddies to the floor” while banishing the “uglies,” turning the album’s sensuality outward — more direct, more mischievous, and openly communal. On the third single — the more restless “NYC DOGS” — Blanco commands listeners to “stick out [their] tongues” like the “bad dogs” they are, and repeatedly invokes the city which inspired and helped actualise this project: “I chose to record CAFE PARADISO in New York because I wanted to come home for a bit,” Blanco explained, “New York is where I ran away to when I was 16 … where I first began writing music after dropping out of Parsons School of Design, where I published my first book of poetry, and where I launched my career on the underground scene 13 years ago.” He continues: “CAFE PARADISO is a record for city kids. It’s heavily inspired by New York, but the New York of now, which isn’t parochial but transatlantic. CAFE PARADISO is also global. It’s a series of vignettes that speak to the lives lived inside the concrete jungle.”

Together, “Butt Sex,” “NYC DOGS,” and the fourth single, the genre-bending Easy Does It (featuring Evanora Unlimited and Simone Alysia), show off the range of Blanco’s collaborative approach, shaped through an international network of artists working across scenes and sensibilities. At the eye of this storm is his longstanding, near psychic creative partnership with producer and composer Drew “FaltyDL” Lustman. “I will probably create music with FaltyDL forever, or as long as he’ll have me,” Blanco says. “Drew really helped me cultivate what I consider to be my ‘true sound,’ the sound that characterises my identity as an artist now that I’ve come to maturity musically.” The “true sound” Blanco refers to resists easy categorisation. Once described as a “magpie-like approach to sound with a casual disregard for genre conventions” (MusicTech, 2023), Blanco’s music operates less as a style than a method — an aural frottage, or the sonic memoir of an urbane artist assembled from fragments, encounters and drift. As noted by Pitchfork in 2016, it is “a swerve from the brusque heterosexualization of nearly all mainstream rap.”

This approach is epitomised by “FOXES” (featuring Tama Gucci). “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free,” Blanco says of the making of this song, which begins with the artist introducing himself — midway through his third studio album, mind you — thanking his “amazing band,” expressing his gratitude for the “amazing tour so far,” and shouting out his collaborators before launching into an incantation like nursery rhyme-like refrain with fable-like lyrics. Arguably the emotional and conceptual climax of this album, Blanco cites this track as “the reason I am a musician is to achieve this kind of freedom that elevates my soul into higher art and performance.’” While “FOXES” captures the album at its most expansive, other tracks locate that same sensibility within more defined, genre-specific forms. A song like “Spread For Me,” for example, could easily exist in the same lineage as heartland rock classics that ooze a certain kind of slick, nonchalant pop Americana. The song is upfront and wholesome — as pop-adjacent as Blanco has ever been — but it hints at something carnal and epicurean hiding under the surface with its rallying cry: “Make like butter and spread for me.”

As high energy as parts of this album might seem, CAFE PARADISO is, at its core, a record about stillness. Blanco insists “is not a point A-to-B record, or a pre-game record. It’s an album about enjoying your own company.” Resisting the logic of escalation or destination, CAFE PARADISO lingers in transitional spaces — the solitary meal, the late-night bar, the airport terminal — where time stretches and the self becomes momentarily unmoored. What emerges is music attuned to the quiet intensity of being alone in public, where observation becomes its own form of participation.

This dual position – being both observer and participant — harks back to Blanco’s formative experiences on the early Internet. “I literally am who I am today because of how much music I was exposed to via Napster and Limewire, and those thrilling early days of downloading music and genre-splicing,” he explains. “It’s the same with selecting songs on a jukebox. I love fragments. I love sketches. I’ve always been obsessed with worlds within worlds, and how subplots create a whole.” He continues, comparing CAFE PARADISO to a “three-act play,” or a script for a “feature film,” and citing references such as Saint Etienne, The Silver Apples, Towa Tei. “I mean this album is pretty bandy,” Blanco says, “it’s a festival album.”

CAFE PARADISO does not mark a rupture so much as a refinement in the career of Mykki Blanco. Drawing together years of experimentation across music, performance, and visual art, this album arrives at a point of transient clarity — it is a confident statement of intent, positioning Blanco not simply as a shape-shifter, but as an artist in full command of his present form.