“If there is one thing I know how to do, it’s how to get the most out of life. Yeah, sure, not everything is perfect. You fuck up. You make mistakes. But hopefully, you’re achieving more than you’re fucking up. Overall, I would say I do well, milking life for all it’s got.” — Mykki Blanco

On Café Paradiso, Mykki Blanco is completely reborn, trading the persona-driven theatrics of his previous releases for something more interior and exacting. The record draws from the diverse, banal and yet idiosyncratic contexts of the artist’s life in transit: “...shitty Wall Street lunch counters and an endless stream of dive bars in the East Village” in New York; “...drinking beer and playing pool in Belleville; the drink that lasts forever at Les Chope des Artists and Chez Jeanette” in Paris; and “languishing for hours at the tea houses or Café Hafa” in Tangier. From these fragments, Café Paradiso assembles a soundtrack for the contemporary, queer flâneur, moving through spaces where being alone does not necessarily mean being lonely. “Café Paradiso is a record for artsy kids,” Blanco explains, “for my cosmopolitan aesthetes to sit alone in a café and work on crafting the life of their dreams, or just make sense of it!” When asked which earlier versions of himself appear here, Blanco is unequivocal: “None.”

If Blanco’s discography exists less as a linear evolution and more as a series of deliberate mutations — each project shifting in terms of tone, genre, and even the function of the voice — then Café Paradiso represents his post-rumspringa clarity. “I love creating music but I’ve never liked the idea of being a one-trick pony,” Blanco explains, “I need to check some things off my ‘Life List.’” After his 2022 album Stay Close to Music and the Postcards from Italia (2023) EP, Blanco spent two years at art school in Switzerland, getting his MFA and deepening his studio practice as a visual artist. “I’ve got a lot of ideas for interdisciplinary projects,” Blanco says, “and I felt the experience helped me level up in other areas of my career and expand my database of knowledge which just ends up making everything I produce even cooler. In September of 2024, Blanco submitted his thesis "The Black Presence In Early Soviet Union Russia" and graduated, then returned to his “first love” — songwriting.

The lead single “Little Feet” (featuring Ian Isiah and Breakaway) sets the tone for the record as a score for the “wayward metropolitan,” to use the artist's own words. Blanco and his collaborators purr about hanging out, hooking up, and dancing the night away under the street lights over a sultry, nostalgic groove that feels both familiar and slightly unreal.

On the second single, the provocative party anthem “Butt Sex,” Blanco calls all his “baddies to the floor” while banishing the “uglies,” turning the album’s sensuality outward — more direct, more mischievous, and openly communal. On the third single — the more restless “NYC DOGS” — Blanco commands listeners to “stick out [their] tongues” like the “bad dogs” they are, and repeatedly invokes the city which inspired and helped actualise this project: “I chose to record Café Paradiso in New York because I wanted to come home for a bit,” Blanco explained, “New York is where I ran away to when I was 16 … where I first began writing music after dropping out of Parsons School of Design, where I published my first book of poetry, and where I launched my career on the underground scene 13 years ago.” He continues: “Café Paradiso is a record for city kids. It’s heavily inspired by New York, but the New York of now, which isn’t parochial but transatlantic. Café Paradiso is also global. It’s a series of vignettes that speak to the lives lived inside the concrete jungle.”

Together, “Butt Sex,” “NYC DOGS,” and the fourth single, the genre-bending Easy Does It (featuring Evanora Unlimited and Simone Alysia), show off the range of Blanco’s collaborative approach