“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. 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.

Café Paradiso does not mark a rupture so much as a refinement in the career of Mykki Blanco. Drawing together years of experimentation across music, performance, and visual art, this album arrives at a point of transient clarity — it is a confident statement of intent, positioning Blanco not simply as a shape-shifter, but as an artist in full command of his present form.

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