Beirut’s Zach Condon: ‘I was a high-school dropout. I was a disorganised mess. I still am. I like chaos’

To find the light, Zach Condon went into the darkness. In early 2020 the American songwriter, who records brooding alternative pop as Beirut, left his home in Berlin and moved hundreds of kilometres north to a Norwegian town deep inside the Arctic Circle. Winter had descended. Hadsel – population 8,000 – shivered in permanent midnight.

“Any original purpose was simply to clear my head,” says Condon, an intense 37-year-old with Brillo-pad hair and a wistful gaze, over Zoom from his studio in Germany. “People were, like, ‘Why the hell did you come here in January? What were you thinking? Please come back in the summer, when it’s nicer.’ And I was, like, ‘No, this is literally what I’m here for.’”

He was falling apart. Several months earlier Condon had suffered the latest in a series of breakdowns caused by his anxiety around touring. Having lost his voice, he scrapped a clutch of dates, including two shows at Vicar Street in Dublin that August. As the new year came around, Condon and his German girlfriend, Lena, packed their bags for Hadsel, where they would rent a cabin on the island of Hadseløya.

There, surrounded by seabirds and the wraith-like glow of the aurora borealis, he worked at calming the turmoil in his life. Now he returns with an extraordinary new Beirut album named after the town that did so much to make him whole again.

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Hadsel is beautiful and baroque, fuelled by the church organs he fell in love with in Norway and by Condon’s dolorous lyrics. “We had so many plans/ This had to end, this had to end,” he sings on So Many Plans, the gorgeously wintry single with which he stepped back into the spotlight and which, both phlegmatic and darkly raffish, sets the tone for the project.

“I was sick on every tour,” he says. “One of the reasons I waited so long for the record is because I was, like, ‘I don’t know if I have the guts to put this stuff out there right away.’ I’m more comfortable talking about it now. I quit drinking in 2018, a year before that [final] tour. That’s how I used to get through – ride that wave.”

Condon assumed that giving up drinking would make life more straightforward. “I thought, ‘I’m going to be better this time. I think I’ve fixed everything – I’m more reliable and more focused and yada yada.’ It turned out, no. As soon as I went on tour I was, like, ‘That’s why I drink, because ... I don’t know how to deal with this.’”

Norway was about healing and renewal. Initially, music was the last thing on his mind. He’d gone north seeking isolation. Darkness has always been a source of comfort, Condon says. After a rough year, endless night was hugely appealing. He has thought about why this might be. It brings him back to his upbringing in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“Around the age of 11 I started getting such bad insomnia, I couldn’t ever sleep until the sun rose. Eventually I got my own bedroom, which was an amazing upgrade. We” – Condon and his siblings – “used to all share a room. I got this bedroom and started making music. My family were so high-stressed. All of us were so neurotic,” he says.

By staying awake at night, “I could have them nearby without having the chaos. I became comforted by that. It was the daytime that came to represent the stress of the mundane – things you don’t want to do. When I was trying to recover in January 2020, it made sense to go somewhere that was permanent night. I get that feeling: slow down, relax.”

Condon, on the cusp of middle age, occupies the uncomfortable position of former boy genius – the wunderkind who fell to earth. He emerged in the mid-2000s as alternative music was caught between the twin hells of Pete Doherty-era landfill indie and “nu-folk”. With Condon as stoic ringmaster, Beirut offered something different: an ever-shifting soundscape drawing on Condon’s love for Balkan folk, Mexican mariachi music and French chanson.

He was young, yet the music felt old and wise. “Delightfully downtrodden,” Rolling Stone said of his 2006 debut, Gulag Orkestar. “Heartbroken serenades and intoxicating ballads,” went a swooning Uncut magazine review of his 2007 album The Flying Club Cup, going on to compare Condon to Thom Yorke and Antony Hegarty.

Condon craved the acclaim. “I was a high-school dropout. I was a disorganised mess,” he says. “I still am in my life. I like chaos. So when they’re saying all that stuff, you have to imagine that at that time I was actually starving for that kind of attention. I drank it up: ‘I need this, please.’ That was one of the reasons we’re on tour. ‘Fistfuls of anxiety medication in order to get on the road again? F**k it. I’ll do it.’ Anything for that attention.”

What partially attracted me to the name Beirut was that there’s a conflict and a struggle involved. The thing is, it’s not mine. There are times when I look at the name and I’m, like, ‘I don’t know’

“Anything” included pushing his mental and physical health to the limit. He hated the road; it made him anxious and affected his body in all sorts of ways – the effect on his voice was particularly devastating. That never changed. If anything, it grew more problematic. In 2019, in his 30s and having weaned himself off alcohol, he could no longer go on.

He “suffered constantly” – “this feeling of doom and horror”. “In hindsight I’m, like, ‘Of course. That’s why I got sick every day,’” he continues. “I was sick the entire US tour, five weeks on and off. Antibiotics and steroids, I got back on them. When I went to Europe and I got sick a lot, a doctor sat me down in Madrid. I was, like, ‘Can I take some steroids and get through this concert?’ He was, like, ‘If you do this again you might do some permanent damage.’”

Hadsel marks a new beginning. But some old questions keep coming up – notably, the idea of calling his project Beirut in the first place. Condon named the band after the Lebanese capital, a place where, much like his songwriting, cultures collide. Of course, meanings can change. With the Middle East once again convulsed by conflict, he understands the name Beirut lands with a new heaviness.

“My music is so apolitical, and that’s such a point of mine. Because music is so removed from politics, it’s the most transcendent, beautiful thing, and politics are the most ugly, mundane thing. And they’re necessary, and they’re important. But I hate when music starts to dive too far in to that. I started zoning out. It is an interesting thing that keeps coming up. I feel kind of awful [about the name Beirut] in some ways because, obviously, when I was a teenager, what partially attracted me to the name was that ... there’s a conflict and a struggle involved. The thing is, it’s not mine. Mine has always been this internal hellhole that I fight and so on. There are times when I look at the name and I’m, like, ‘I don’t know.’”

He shrugs as if to say this isn’t for him to fret about. He has his music, and, spared the ordeal of touring, he’s becoming a fully functioning human being again. (He will play some shows in Berlin to promote Hadsel, and that will be that.) It’s enough for any one person to deal with.

“One thing I will say is that I don’t agree with this modern overcorrection that is happening where you’re not allowed to wear a Native American costume on Halloween, you’re not allowed talk about a culture that isn’t yours. F**k that. It’s a free world. This is bullsh*t. We can’t walk around treading on eggshells all the time.”

Hadsel is released on Friday, November 10th