Nothing to Hide Behind: Alec McGarry on Starting Over, Finding His Voice and Becoming Himself

When I speak to Alec McGarry, he is sitting in his studio in Los Angeles, nearly two years into a life that looks very different from the one he knew growing up in Hertfordshire.

There is an ease to him when we talk. He is open, quick to laugh, but just as willing to follow a conversation somewhere more vulnerable. It does not take long for talk of new music and fresh beginnings to become something more personal: identity, growing up, and the strange experience of realising the person you have become no longer entirely fits the version of you people already know.

For six years, Alec was one third of New Rules. He speaks about those years with warmth, describing them as “priceless.” He entered the industry young, knowing little about it beyond the fact that he loved music, and spent some of his most formative years alongside two people whose lives became deeply intertwined with his own. But six years, particularly at that age, leaves a lot of room to change. “I think so much changes in a person,” he tells me. “So much changed in me.”

Stepping away was never about rejecting what came before. If anything, the way Alec talks about New Rules makes clear how much that chapter still means to him. Somewhere along the way, though, parts of him had begun asking for more room. There were things he wanted to say differently, emotions he wanted to explore without softening or reshaping them, and beneath the version of Alec people had become familiar with, another had quietly continued growing.

In a band, he explains, even something deeply personal can become a shared confession. A feeling that begins with one person can eventually belong to three, carried by other voices and softened by the presence of people beside you. This time, the words belong entirely to him. “I’ve got nothing to hide behind now,” he says, simply, but the words linger.

The shift towards something of his own had been gradual, although a health scare during that period seems to have brought much of what Alec was already questioning into sharper focus. He does not linger on the details and is quick to assure me that he is fine now, but the experience clearly impacted the way he thought about time. “I think that health scare put a lot of things into perspective for me,” he says. “That the whole of life’s short, you may as well just do what you want to do, when you want to do it.”

There is a quiet weight to the way he says it. Not dramatic or rehearsed, but more like a belief he had been forced to arrive at sooner than possibly expected. Around the same period, Alec found himself back home in Hertfordshire, sleeping once again in his childhood bedroom. After years spent touring, living with his bandmates and growing up within an industry that had shaped much of his adult life, returning to somewhere so familiar gave him an unfamiliar amount of space to think. He describes that time as something close to a pressure cooker, a period in which so much was changing at once that eventually staying still began to feel like a decision in itself.

It was from somewhere inside that period that Dozers emerged.

“Writing that song felt like this unclogging of a tap,” Alec remembers. “And then everything just started to flow.” Stories, thoughts and feelings he had been carrying began finding their way into the music, and what followed was not so much a calculated attempt to establish himself as a solo artist as the gradual recognition that something distinct was already taking shape. The songs shared a tone, a sound and an emotional language that felt separate enough to deserve its own space. “I was like, okay, this is very much its own thing. I need to honour that.”

At its centre, Dozers is a song about identity. Alec describes a wider metaphor of the natural world being repeatedly reshaped to fit somebody else's image of what it should be, but underneath it sits something much closer to his own experience. “That’s how I was feeling at the time,” he says. “Just rediscovering who I was and what I wanted to say and what was meaningful to me.”

It is that idea of rediscovery, rather than reinvention, that seems to define much of what Alec is doing now. He isn't trying to erase the person he was or manufacture somebody entirely new in his place. Instead, there is a sense that he is slowly closing the distance between the person he had become privately and the version of himself he still felt expected to carry publicly. “I was growing up, but I had this persona in the band and I felt the need to kind of play that,” he tells me. “Then it got to the point where it felt so inauthentic and so not like me anymore.”

When I ask what had existed underneath that persona, Alec's answer is immediate. “I’m a really emotional person. I’m a very sensitive person.” The longer we talk, the easier that is to understand. He describes himself as introspective, somebody who spends a lot of time in his own head and genuinely enjoys his own company. He can be extroverted when he wants to be, but there was another, quieter part of him that he felt had gradually been pushed further into the background. “I think that was something that I’d suppressed,” he says.

Part of that came from an awareness of the role he occupied. Being in a boy band carried an expectation of lightness, of fun, of presenting a version of youth that people could easily recognise. “You’ve got to turn the face on,” Alec says. He had entered New Rules as a teenager, and over time the image he had learnt to inhabit began to feel increasingly distant from the person growing underneath it.

“I think I kind of had this purpose to be a boy,” he reflects, “and as I was growing into a man... it no longer really resonated as much.”

There is something silently complicated about outgrowing a version of yourself that other people still love. For Alec, becoming more honest about who he was meant accepting that change would not necessarily make sense to everyone, and that choosing what felt right for him could still mean disappointing people he cared about. For a while, that knowledge made it easier to stay where he was. Alec knew that changing direction would affect more than just him, and when a life has been built alongside other people, leaving it is rarely as simple as knowing something needs to change. He speaks about reaching a point where he could feel the truth of that privately, while still struggling to act on it publicly. “There’s only so long you can hide the truth,” he says.

Around that time, a friend sent him an interview with David Bowie that gave shape to something Alec had been feeling but had not quite articulated. In it, Bowie describes an artist walking out into the sea until the water is high enough that their feet can only just touch the ground: not completely lost, but no longer standing somewhere safe. It is at that point of uncertainty, he suggests, that the most interesting work begins. Alec recognised himself immediately, only in reverse. “I just felt like I’d been planted on my feet for too long,” he tells me.

There is a certain contradiction in choosing instability after a period that had already taught him how fragile certainty could be. But perhaps that was precisely why it mattered. The health scare, the return home, and the growing disconnect between the life he knew and the person he felt himself becoming had all made one thing increasingly difficult to ignore: familiarity was not the same thing as fulfilment.

When I ask which part of starting again has been harder, letting go of who people already believed he was or working out who he wanted to become next, Alec initially leans towards the latter. Yet as he talks through it, his answer becomes less about becoming someone new and more about allowing the changes that had already happened internally to finally exist outside of him.

“I’d already kind of let go,” he explains. “It was more just clearing a path to allow that to come through, and making it so that everything else in my life aligned with how I was feeling inside." That word, aligned, seems to sit quietly beneath almost everything Alec is telling me. Moving to Los Angeles, making music alone, allowing himself to be more sensitive, trusting ideas without two other voices beside him: none of it feels like an attempt to construct a new identity. It feels more like an effort to make his external life resemble the person he had already become.

And that process has not made him suddenly certain of himself. If anything, creative independence has made the doubts harder to avoid. Alec enjoys being able to follow an idea entirely on instinct, but when every decision is yours, so is every opportunity to question it. “I’m such an imposter on my own ideas and my own creative integrity,” he admits. “I second-guess a lot.” It is a vulnerability that sits interestingly alongside the conviction behind Shadow Dancer. Slower and moodier than what might have seemed like the obvious next step, the song was one of those rare decisions Alec says simply felt clear to him. There was still room to doubt himself, but not enough to override the instinct that this was the song he wanted people to hear next.

More revealingly, though, Shadow Dancer became another example of Alec's music telling him something about himself before he had fully understood it.

Written in the summer of 2024, the song eventually exposed a fear he had not consciously known he was carrying: not the fear of a relationship ending, but of one continuing long after the feeling inside it had disappeared. “Something that terrifies me is being in a relationship in which you both keep it going for convenience, and all the love and emotion there has just died,” he says. “But it’s much harder to leave than it is to stay, and so you just stay.”

For someone who readily describes himself

as “a bit of a romantic,” it is perhaps unsurprising that the thought unsettles him. What is more interesting is that he did not entirely recognise it until the song gave it back to him.

One lyric, in particular, holds much of that feeling: “I folded the page, and you skimmed the chapter.” When I ask Alec about it, he doesn't offer an abstract explanation. Instead, he pictures a couple reading beside one another in bed, the kind of small domestic scene that could easily be mistaken for intimacy. One person reaches the end of something meaningful enough to mark their place; the other moves through it without the same weight.

It is the possibility of two people becoming comfortable enough to coexist, but no longer truly sharing the same life, that seems to disturb him most. “You’re marking this as a really important time in your life,” he explains. “This is a meaningful moment, and the other person has just skimmed through it.”

There is something revealing in the fact that Alec's mind goes immediately to a scene. He describes himself as having a “very cinematic brain,” and throughout our conversation - and our half hour tangent on Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' - it becomes clear that he does not only process the world through music. He writes fiction, journals, thinks in images and keeps notes filled with ideas that may eventually become songs, stories, films or nothing at all.

Perhaps the clearest glimpse of that person comes when our conversation, somehow, turns to dinosaurs. Alec tells me about a recent trip where he came across dinosaur tracks and fossils, and almost immediately he becomes more animated. He starts listing the species he saw, the size of the footprints, the details that completely blew his mind, and for a moment it is incredibly easy to see the little boy who once fell in love with Jurassic Park.

Then he tells me about the fossilised poo.

“I went up to it, and I just hugged it, and I started crying,” he says, laughing.

It is objectively a ridiculous sentence, which only makes the sincerity behind it more endearing. Alec has loved dinosaurs since he was three or four years old, and that fascination has clearly never left him. Standing there, surrounded by real tracks and fossils, the thing he had spent years being fascinated by suddenly felt impossibly close.

“It was just such a huge part of my childhood, and so much of who I am,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it.” As he tells me the story, that childhood excitement is still completely visible. For all the conversation we have had about growing up and changing, this feels like a reminder that some parts of us never really go anywhere.

Sometimes, he tells me, a song can exist for months before he realises it has been describing him all along. He will return to something he once believed was fictional and suddenly recognise the feeling beneath it: “Oh, ****, this is literally how I’ve been feeling.”Perhaps that is why he is increasingly comfortable leaving some things unresolved. Alec has little interest in telling a listener exactly what they should feel when they hear his music. Once a song leaves him, he likes the idea that it can become somebody else's. “It just goes from being only mine to being everyone’s,” he says.

The same openness seems to extend to how he wants to be perceived. There was a time when being misunderstood affected him more deeply, particularly through periods of change when other people were left to fill in gaps he could not always explain. Now, he is learning there is a limit to how much of another person's interpretation he can carry.

And when that noise does become too loud, Alec's ways of returning to himself are surprisingly uncomplicated. He talks about therapy, about calling friends who know him beyond whatever is happening professionally, and about disappearing somewhere quiet enough to hear his own thoughts again. “Community is everything to me,” he says, something that feels particularly significant from an artist learning how to stand alone without mistaking independence for isolation.

By the time I ask Alec who he hopes he becomes through this period, our conversation has travelled a long way from the practicalities of releasing music. His answer, fittingly, is not about success in any measurable sense. “I’ve never felt more myself, and I’ve never felt more comfortable as myself,” he says. It is not a declaration that everything has suddenly fallen into place. Alec is quick to acknowledge the days when imposter syndrome returns, when his confidence disappears or he questions whether he is even moving in the right direction. Part of what he has begun to understand is that peace, certainty and happiness are not fixed destinations. They move, as people do.

What he hopes to keep is the courage to notice when something is no longer working and to act on what he finds. “I would like to be someone who has the courage to step back, look at their life objectively and say, ‘This is working and this isn’t working,’ and then have the courage to act on it.”

Perhaps that is the quietest truth running through this chapter of Alec's life. Becoming yourself does not always arrive as a dramatic reinvention. Sometimes it looks like recognising the distance between who you are and the life you have built, then slowly finding the courage to close it.

For Alec, that distance seems smaller than it once was.

There may be nothing left to hide behind, but increasingly, there is less he seems to want to hide.