Mild High Club

Mild High Club is the solo project and live band helmed by Alex Brettin, a Los Angeles-based musician originally from Chicago. Influenced by AOR and jazz, Brettin began working on Mild High Club material in 2012 by himself, using guitars, keyboards, computers, and a four-track recorder, while shuttling between Chicago, Baltimore, and Los Angeles.

While Alex Brettin, “bartender and resident selector” of the metaphysical listening lounge he calls the Mild High Club, could not have foreseen the numerous overlapping crises of these past years, his latest album, Going Going Gone (2021), feels especially apt for the moment. On the first single, “Me Myself and Dollar Hell,” he explores themes of paranoia, individualism, kleptocracy, gun violence, faith, and climate change. “Dionysian State” satirizes the nightmare of individualism in America and wherever that mindset exists in the world, with lyrics portraying decline before voices come together to find a form of humanity toasting to the madness.

Following his Mild High Club debut Timeline (2015), which examined the burgeoning social media age, and second album Skiptracing (2016), which questioned his identity as an artist and featured the massively popular single “Homage”, Brettin followed with the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard collaboration Sketches from Brunswick East in 2017. After releasing three records in three years via Stones Throw Records, he sought to hone his craft over the five-year process that would yield Going Going Gone.