John Maus Tickets

John Maus, a 21st-century philosopher-musician who’s risen to mythic status in the last 20 years. His fierce belief in the emotional weight of sound, feeling deeply and thinking seriously, arrangements that sound as good at the club as they do at the symposium, bizzarro takes on popular music tropes, and legendary live shows have inspired legions of acolytes. His album 'Later Than You Think' is the clearest demonstration of this ethos to date. 

Between four revelatory albums, Maus wrote a book-length dissertation on communication technologies as mechanisms of societal control and built an arsenal of analog synths in his basement. These achievements were the product of deep struggle. “Can’t write a word so you lock yourself up / So they say you’re losing your mind,” he sings on Later Than You Think. It’s a creative block he used to endure every time he picked up a pen, “wearied and burdened and ridden around like a donkey with a bit in [his] mouth by a trillion demons,” as he told Henry Wallis on an enlightening episode of the Forms podcast. Embroiled in spiritual battle — between the perfect and the good, but also between good and evil — he eventually found a path forward. But to understand Maus’s path to salvation, we must first know his road to rock bottom.

In late 2017, Maus released Screen Memories, his first album since 2011, and married the love of his life. 2018 saw him touring with a band for the first time, his brother Joe on bass. But things quickly crumbled. On tour in Europe the following year, Joe died suddenly of an undiagnosed heart condition. Then his uncle, who’d been like a second father to him, passed away, followed in 2019 by his aunt. The stress imperiled his marriage to the point of dissolution. “Let me through,” he repeats imploringly on Later Than You Think.  

“I needed somebody or something to let me through the veil of tears,” he says now. “Let me through to the peace that Earth cannot give.” He turned to faith. Raised Catholic in rural Minnesota, he’d always been interested in spirituality from a philosophical perspective. After a quarter-century lapse, he returned to what he knew — attending church on Sundays, performing the acts of the liturgy, and “waiting for the glorious appearance of the Lord who will redeem the world.” Slowly, he began to pick up the pieces of his shattered life.

The songs on 'Later Than You Think' are emotionally complex, alternately stoic and ecstatic. “Here’s your time for disappear,” he sings at one point, but this disappearance is ultimately a good thing. The death of self, of hubristic ego, brings us closer to the eternal. Elsewhere, on tracks like “Came & Got,” “Let Me Through,” and “Reconstruct Your Life,” he sings abstractly of his recent struggles, his tone ranging from desperation to resilience. Religious themes and iconography surface throughout the album, shaping the emotional and aesthetic atmosphere. 

'Later Than You Think' contains multitudes — the lush and the bare, the sacred and the profane, minimalist discipline and maximalist indulgence, counterpoint and simple pop harmony. But at the core of the commotion, one thing is clear: John Maus’s music insists on the power of genuine emotion and radical sincerity. Engaging deeply with the crisis of modern life, he longs for truth and transcendence in an age of irony, alienation and political decay. His new project is a radical reawakening - powered by faith, acceptance, and an urgent belief that time is of the essence and this is the moment of truth.