The music industry’s most influential critic is on the hunt for the perfect interview, and now he’s betting on himself to make it happen.
Anthony Fantano — “the internet’s busiest music nerd” who built a career on YouTube from hot takes on everyone from Kanye West to Death Grips to Radiohead — is officially launching A Perfect Interview, he revealed on Tuesday, his first longform interview series and the latest in his growing media empire.
“It’s what the content sphere demands as far as in-depth conversations on music,” Fantano tells The Hollywood Reporter of his rationale for starting the show, steadily pacing on a walking pad during a Zoom call from his Connecticut home.
“It’s something I’d always wanted to do but have always been wary of for a handful of reasons,” he continues. “I wanted to make sure I could maintain my independent voice. Can I do it in a way where I’m not having to exchange industry favors or have to interview people I don’t want to talk to? But I feel like I met the right people, and I think there’s enough notoriety and understanding on what I do that it just feels like it’s time.”
Fantano’s interview with Olivia Rodrigo over the summer served as the pilot for the concept. He’d already been steadily interviewing artists on his channels since the pandemic, but this was a significant step up, evolving from lower quality talking head zoom interviews to a more professional grade TV-ready production.
Now he’s got a slate of shows lined up with a collection of favorites he’s praised before, starting with Jane Remover on Monday. Others in the pipeline are Denzel Curry, Kenneth Blume (the producer formerly known as Kenny Beats), JPEGMAFIA, Chat Pile and Horsegiirl.
Filming the show in Brooklyn, Fantano is partnering with production company Talkhouse for Perfect Interview. He developed the show with veteran music journalists Emilie Friedlander and Drew Millard, with the duo producing the show with Sam Blumenfeld. Conner Schuurmans is serving as director.
“Anthony is a distinct character in this space, he consumes everything, and his knowledge of music is obviously unmatched,” Talkhouse co-founder and president Ian Wheeler says. “He’s sitting down with an artist, and he really understands who he’s sitting with. Not to take shots at any other interviewers, but I think that’s really hard.”
Fantano will be competing with the likes of popular music press stops such as Apple Music’s Zane Lowe Show and The New York Times’ Popcast, as well as with traditional media outlets like Rolling Stone or GQ, which have delved heavier on longform video as well.
He of course would like to get more Rodrigo-level A-listers along with the more niche tastemakers onto the show but adds that “the interest is more whether or not I feel like it would make for an interesting conversation.”
So what does Fantano want to bring to the space?
“I feel like there’s a lack of spontaneity, I want to kind of move past the sterility that I’ve been noticing in a lot of recent interview content,” he says. “Push back as well if it’s necessary, because I don’t want this to be a platform for disinformation or one-sided discourse. And in addition to that, some kind of fun or whimsy or kind of X factor element where it can be a little more unpredictable, but still provide artists and PR with the assurance that like we’re not doing this to go too far off the rails or ruin your career or something like that.”
Fantano is getting into the game as artists and their teams exact more leverage than ever when content creators are looking to get access. He acknowledges that, saying that “on some level you’re going to be asked to give up at least a little bit of control in terms of having them right there directly in front of you.”
He doesn’t quite call Perfect Interview journalism but says that “we’re trying to be as journalistic and honest as possible in terms of what we’re presenting and what we’re recording.”
“We don’t want to be pulling any punches on anybody,” Fantano says. “If there is a controversial topic, a hot-button issue that we personally feel like needs to be discussed, we want to come at them directly with that as we’re opening up conversations. You’re not going to find me in a position where I’m sitting there across and I’m ignoring the elephant in the room. if we can’t if we can’t have these discussions, I would just much rather not have them.
A Perfect Interview comes more than 15 years into Fantano’s ascent in music media. Since launching YouTube Channel the Needle Drop back in 2009 (and a subsequent second eponymous channel in 2017), Fantano has amassed an audience of a combined 5 million subscribers, primarily younger music fans. At first glance, he approaches criticism with an almost childlike irreverence, whether it’s his “melon” nickname for his shaved head, his old “best teeth in the game mantra,” the flannels he wears to indicate love or hatred for an album, or his now-defunct shitposting channel thatistheplan.
Nearly 10 years ago to the day from our conversation, Fantano published a notorious review panning Corey Feldman’s wildly confounding album Angelic 2 the Core. He was one of the only mainstream music critics to review the project at all, let alone devote 50 minutes dissecting why it was the worst album of the year.
Fantano smirks when I ask about the review, pulling the album off a display shelf just behind him in his office beside albums by Howlin’ Wolf and Dr. John. “It’s always watching over me,” he says coyly.
That humor reflects in the Perfect Interview name itself; a half-sarcastic tongue-in-cheek title is about Fantano as it gets.
“We do want it to be at least a little bit ridiculous and not high off its own farts or whatever,” Fantano says. “It is definitely a little bit of a bluff, and one that I think on some level is a bit of a barb to potential naysayers who might look at it skeptically. It’s a very easy, silly bait.”
Still, beyond those sillier antics, Fantano’s content come with breathless vigor and detailed context and research. While he will review the biggest albums in the pop music landscape, he puts as much weight around even the most esoteric of indie projects, building a base discussing the artists many mainstream outlets have struggled to cover because they don’t yield enough page views. His delivery and taste have earned him enough clout that in 2020, the Times called Fantano “the only music critic who matters (if you’re under 25.)”
When speaking of the state of broader mainstream music criticism, Fantano compares it to “picking through a bushel of bruised apples.”
Photo courtesy of Caroline Waxse
Caroline Waxse
“The way algorithms and social media work now, and sort of like what gets pushed and what gets emphasized, there’s no incentive structure trying to get anybody to be thorough, consistent or honest,” he says. “Those that do get drowned out by Twitter bot accounts and people paid to say an album or song is good. I feel blessed to have kind of done this in a way to where it just very slowly escalated over time.”
Fantano’s rise came as the legacy institutions that would’ve once as voraciously covered those musicians are steadily petering off. Bigger Outlets such as Rolling Stone and Pitchfork still provide robust coverage, but smaller publications have been hit hard. The staff at popular indie music blogs BrooklynVegan and Alternative Press, for example, faced significant layoffs over the summer, while late night television continues to roll back on music programming as well. As such, there’s a lane for Fantano in all sorts of music content, whether that’s reviews or longform interviews.
“There’s so much missing in music media right now, and because of that, so much music comes out and the fans aren’t getting the story,” Wheeler says. “And that’s created a problem today where stuff comes out and we just move on. Record cycles last two weeks if you’re lucky. There’s a need to put that story back into the conversation. It increases the stakes for a record when you’re actually understanding some of the stuff that’s going on with it.”
Fantano’s no-holds-barred takes have earned him no shortage of flak from the artist class, with Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas name-dropping the critic on the band’s latest album Reality Awaits earlier this year on their song “Lonely in the Future.” A years-old beef with Halsey over a harsh review of her 2024 album The Great Impersonator reignited over the summer too, with the musician and critic flinging snarky tweets at one another before Fantano defended himself in a Variety interview calling himself “the most relevant and impactful music critic of my – and any generation for over 10 years now.”
Fantano says he’d like to use Perfect Interview to share space with artists he has a thornier history with, adding that he’s already been back and forth with Grimes’ team about getting the indie pop act for an interview, but that her team “has been very dodgy with scheduling with us.”
“She said online like ‘oh, we’re gonna do a debate, we’re gonna do a therapy session.” Da da da da da. Listen, whenever you want to schedule, I’m here. Let’s do it. We’re ready. We can pencil you in at any time. Let me know.”