The Afterglow of MICO
On When the lights turn on, the Toronto-born singer-songwriter explores what it means to be fully seen.
- Published on
by Cam Delisle
Photos by Kianna Sumitani | Styling by Cam Delisle | Cover Design by Sophia Pan
Walking into MICO’s show at Toronto’s Hard Luck Bar, I don’t have to check the marquee to know that I’m in the right place. Four years ago, this was where he played his first-ever show. Now, it’s packed wall-to-wall with thrifted plaid shirts – sleeves hacked off five minutes before doors – jorts so oversized they’re practically capris, and enough silver jewellery glinting under the dim overheads to stock a flea market.
The show is an underplay of sorts for the internationally celebrated alt-pop rock artist, but more importantly, it’s a homecoming. Though he recently relocated to Los Angeles, his hometown fans have turned out in full force.
They’re all standing around in anticipation before his set, chatting like old friends, swapping stories over the pre-show playlist (which, for the record, included more than one Conan Gray song), and snapping grainy photos on digital cameras. MICO affectionately refers to them as his “Amicos” – a fandom name that feels less like branding and more like an inside joke that’s grown into a community. Looking around the room, it’s easy to see why. They don’t just show up for his music; they’ve built a world around it.
By the time I see MICO – born Jose Miguel Veloso – the next day for our cover shoot, the adrenaline hasn’t quite worn off. He’s running on little sleep after playing the entirety of his debut LP, When the lights turn on, live for the first time, though any signs of exhaustion disappear the second that the conversation turns to the music.
He’s surrounded by vintage lamps and candles, arranged with deliberate precision, casting an intentionally harsh, uneven light. A literal nod to the record’s title, yes, but also a recurring idea across much of the album. It comes from a lyric in “OH!” – “It feels like shit when the lights turn on” – which, in this setting, feels almost a little too on the nose.
“As brutal as it is,” he admits, “this is the path that I chose and I might not be able to get out of it, but would I really want to now?” He pauses before continuing: “When I’m on that stage and the lights turn on and I see a crowd of people facing me, and I’m singing out stuff that’s extremely truthful to me – that is the most raw and direct version of myself that I could possibly give to anybody.”
Visibility has always been MICO’s currency. On When the lights turn on, it’s also the thing he interrogates. The album doesn’t reject the internet that made him; it questions what gets left behind when an audience mistakes access for intimacy.
“I have a lot to say on this record that I’ve been holding back for a while,” he says. “I think people have picked up on it too with the singles, but I’m excited for everything to be able to speak for itself.”
That tension becomes explicit on “DREAMBOY,” the project’s lead single. “You treat me like a shiny toy to reach for,” he croons, describing a relationship defined by idealization, where he’s reduced to something decorative rather than understood. While it reads more easily as a romantic address, it also points toward a broader pattern of projection, where closeness is imagined rather than actually known.
Enter Stillville: the fictional, Truman Show-esque world that MICO built for the album to live within. The clearest depiction of it appears in the video for “Like you mean it,” which MICO describes as unfolding along a character arc that mirrors the song itself. “The start of the song is the recognition, the chorus is the confrontation, and the second verse is like… we’re too far gone,” he says, continuing, “The main part of Stillville that we wanted to portray was the recognition that things were wrong, trying to combat it, and ultimately accepting that it’s helpless to fight by the end of it.”
Though Stillville draws influence from films like The Truman Show and Pleasantville, MICO is more interested in what separates it from them: the lack of escape. Where those stories ultimately resolve through departure or liberation, this project lingers in something more cyclical and unresolved.
“The main thing that happens at the end of all of those is that they find a way to escape, but that’s not necessarily what this project is about. It’s not trying to find your way out of the cycle. It’s about finding ways to be comfortable with knowing that it’s going to repeat itself over and over again and that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.”
He pauses on the distinction between fiction and intention – between narratives where autonomy is stripped away and one where it’s actively chosen. The comparison, he suggests, only holds up to a point.
“All of those characters in those movies had their autonomies, like, ripped from them. This is something that I willingly chose to enter.”
MICO never speaks about fame as something that happened to him; he speaks about it as a consequence of making the kind of art he wanted to make. The discomfort is real, but so is the agency. If When the lights turn on is an album about being watched, it’s equally one about deciding to keep stepping into the light anyway.
That willingness to keep stepping forward is the album’s defining gamble. Every creative decision that he makes seems to hinge on the same question: what happens if you push a little further? “In order to find yourself creatively, 99% of the time you need to push yourself to what your limits and your boundaries are in order to get something that actually says something at all.” The outcome, he insists, is almost beside the point. “I’m putting all of my cards on the table and however it goes is however it goes,” he shrugs. “I just want to make people feel something at all.”
A few days after we meet, MICO is headed back to L.A., a destination he speaks about with noticeably less enthusiasm than the Toronto show that preceded it. Home, it turns out, is a slippery concept. It’s a subject that comes up more than once throughout our conversation, made all the more fitting by When the lights turn on‘s cover art, which finds him perched atop the roof of a suburban house. “Home is nothing but a construct to me at this point because I’ve been away from it for so long,” he confesses.
In many ways, that’s what When the lights turn on has been circling all along. Not that MICO has finally found somewhere to belong, but that he’s stopped looking for permanence in a place. Instead, he finds it in the act of creation itself – in the choice to keep making music that risks misunderstanding, invites projection and, despite all of it, insists on honesty. He may not know exactly where home is anymore, but when the lights turn on, he knows exactly who he is.
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