Alester Is Anything But "Hard To Love" In Newest Single

“Long live Boston DIY,” pop artist Alester wants to shout from the rooftops. The Bostonian musician has had his sights set on the house show scene since the start of his career. “When I first started gigging,” Alester admits, “I was playing bars and clubs and stuff, things that were considered ‘real’ venues that were above-board and coveted by all my peers.” Now, most of his community has been formed through these creative spaces. Pulling from his live setlists, he released his newest single, “Hard to Love” on December 6.

Image courtesy of William Rowan

Alester started making music around the age of 13, all because of one-hit wonder, MAGIC! and their song “Rude.” “It was widely panned by critics for being an overly simplistic, greatest-common-denominator pop album,” explains Alester. “To me, though, for that same reason, it felt like an instructional book.” From there, he began putting together his own beats on his laptop. 

The music he makes is labeled as pop, but only because (in his own words) pop can mean anything. The label gives him a structure for his music, but the freedom to lyrically explore the topics he wants. Those topics tend to lean toward religion, due to Alester’s Catholic upbringing. “The ‘Alester persona’ is about embracing religious trauma in a post-ironic way,” he says. This persona he slips into allows the artist to explore his cisgender-ness, as well, through drag ideology. He compares his own character to both Dolly Parton’s over-the-top femininity and Bruce Springsteen’s performed machismo. 

While Alester often tries to research his songs, loving to go down Wikipedia rabbit holes, it often ends in failure. His songs tend to be spontaneous, despite exploring the web, “especially about esoterica and 20th-century art and things that require lots of context to understand,” he lists. An idea will appear in Alester’s head — sometimes a fully-formed segment of a song — and he’ll begin to transcribe it from there. “I don’t think it’s appreciated enough that inspiration has more in common with archeology than it does with construction, at least for me,” he says. 

“I don’t think it’s appreciated enough that inspiration has more in common with archeology than it does with construction, at least for me.”

The process looked similar for “Hard To Love.” Originally, the concept for this song was developed in 2022. Co-created with friends Ana Schon, Emmett Price IV and Vincent Baur, this version was performed live for a while, as a sort of rough cut. Alester determined it was missing something, though, and began to rework it into this electronic remix he recorded. 

In the studio, he describes his process like “colorizing a photograph. The thing exists already inside my head and my initial voice memo is a black and white snapshot. The production is getting it accurate to the source.”

The song itself is described best in Alester’s own words — a “catholic guilt, bump-n-grind jam.” The song is focused on the tie between sex and shame that the church creates in many devoted believers, as well as in those who have since converted — when religion is so central to one’s identity, it's hard to get rid of it. The production adds to the undeniable sex factor, though: full and layered. It's big and unapologetic, challenging the religion-induced guilt. 

Finally, Alester is getting the chance to perform at the house shows he’s always wanted to. While the DIY community is currently experiencing some undue safety issues, the bonds created there remain strong. “...People go to those venues to listen to music,” Alester says. “There’s less of a boundary and a more immediate connection between audience and performer since we’re all crammed into a tiny little space together. It’s beautiful. I love it.” 

If you’d like to support Alester and his music, check him out on Spotify and Instagram!