Artist

Mac DeMarco

Duncan, Canada • b. 1990

Mac DeMarco is a musician from Duncan, Canada, active since 1990. Their discography on Gatefold includes 16 records.

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Albums tracked

274

In collections

1990

Since

Biography

Mac DeMarco (born Vernor Winfield MacBriare Smith IV in Duncan, BC, on 30 April 1990) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer. DeMarco has released nine full-length studio albums, his debut Rock and Roll Night Club (2012), 2 (2012), Salad Days (2014), Another One (2015), This Old Dog (2017), Here Comes the Cowboy (2019), Five Easy Hot Dogs (2023), One Wayne G (2023) and Guitar (2025) During high school DeMarco was in several bands

The Arc of Mac DeMarco

The pivots — what forced Mac DeMarco to reinvent.

The Captured Tracks Tape Jams
Between Rock and Roll Night Club and Salad Days, DeMarco built an entire aesthetic out of half-broken gear and tape varispeed tricks in Montreal and Brooklyn bedrooms. He tracked every instrument himself, leaning hard on cheap chorus pedals and bouncy basslines. The live shows turned into chaotic beer-soaked party circuits, but the records were precision-engineered pop miniatures. It defined indie rock for an entire decade whether people want to admit it or not.
The California Acoustic Realignment
Moving to Los Angeles in the mid-2010s stripped away the cartoonish slacker veneer. 2017's This Old Dog traded the jangly electric guitars for nylon acoustics, Prophet synthesizers, and bare-bones CR-78 drum programming while he dealt with his estranged father's failing health. The songwriting grew patient, dark, and profoundly vulnerable. You hear a guy stepping back from the indie-rock hype machine to become an unhurried home-recording purist.
Total Independence and Road Minimalism
Severing ties with traditional label infrastructure, he launched Mac's Record Label and stripped the operation down to its studs. 2023's Five Easy Hot Dogs was an instrumental road album cut across motels and cabins in a road trip from LA to upstate New York with a portable digital rig. He followed it with a gargantuan 199-track uncurated vault dump. It was a complete rejection of album rollout cycles in favor of pure, unfiltered documentation.

Influences

Haruomi Hosono — DeMarco has repeatedly cited Hosono as his ultimate musical hero, eventually sharing stages with him and recording together in Japan. Hosono's tropical solo records and immaculate, bouncy bass pocket are the direct foundation for DeMarco's rhythm section style. It is the gold standard for how to make effortless, slightly eccentric pop music.
Shuggie Otis — DeMarco cited Otis's 1974 self-produced masterpiece Inspiration Information as the turning point for how he approached home recording. Otis pioneered tracking every instrument alone using early drum machines and lush guitar arrangements. You hear that exact solo-isolation intimacy in DeMarco's rhythm tracks and clean, warm lead fills.
Jonathan Richman — Richman proved that simple, naive chord progressions and earnest delivery cut harder than complex arrangements. DeMarco shares Richman's disarming lack of pretension and acoustic storytelling simplicity. It is the blueprint for turning deliberate plainness into an art form.
Steely Dan — DeMarco openly professes his love for Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's clean, jazz-inflected chord voicings and dry drum production. The smooth electric piano fills and tight jazz chords on Another One come straight out of the Dan playbook. He took their sophisticated yacht-rock harmony and translated it onto a cracked cassette deck.
The Beatles — DeMarco has covered 'Wonderful Christmastime' and continually cites Paul McCartney's early DIY home-recorded solo work as a core influence. McCartney II gave him the green light to play with quirky synthesizers and weird tape speeds in a bedroom. The clean, melodic basslines driving his songs are pure McCartney discipleship.