Ganser Shares "Black Sand," Announce New LP

Chicago’s Ganser is a band that refuses to be pinned down. Composed of Alicia Gaines, Sophie Sputnik, and Brian Cundiff, the band traffics in a taut and propulsive blend of no wave, art rock, and post punk, and emerged to wide acclaim during the pandemic, with the release of 2020’s Just Look At The Sky.

Today, the band is announcing its highly anticipated third LP, Animal Hospital (felte), that will be released on August 29th. To mark the announcement, the band is sharing the album’s opening track, “Black Sand,” accompanied by a video directed by Gaines.

Animal Hospital, which revives the band’s relationship with producer Angus Andrew, is Ganser at their most dynamic, stretching the confines of their sonic boundaries into new territory, testing the elastic limits of their sound. The band remains steadfastly committed to propulsive patterns; drums that pound exacting beats on the heart, pulse quickened by bass and guitars, synths to calm the nerves. Building endless rhythm beneath feet moving in time on a dance floor, or a sidewalk masquerading as one.

It’s immediately clear that the band’s instincts have only sharpened since the release of their last LP, filtering the absurd and the profound through a prism and emerging with music that refuses to believe that any one thing is true, that instead all things hold strength and secrets in their shadows, and it’s only in beckoning us all to the floor and giving us purpose that we can understand the inescapable beauty of all contradictory things.

“The album is about that space between what we are and what we pretend to be,” Gaines explains. “You’ve got instincts: raw, animal things—and then all these systems we build, all these dreams of being civilized or advanced or whatever. But those two things don’t always line up. And time doesn’t care. Time just keeps going. It pulls everything apart, slow and quiet like water in the walls. And we’re all just in there, making noise, trying to figure out which side of the glass we’re on.“

The album’s tone is appropriately set by the ferocious lead-off track “Black Sand,” led by drums that command an assembly of swirling guitars, tone like a razor’s edge, shimmering, sharp, and sleek. All of it building to a fever pitch, with vocalist Sophie Sputnik taunting an unseen force “don’t speak, don’t say it, if you put in the air I might catch it.”

Sputnik says of the track:

“When I wrote these lyrics a few years ago there were wildfires, real ones. And a lot of talk around LGBTQ rights in Florida where I’m from. And it’s strange because these things, they don’t just go away. They linger. They shift. They burn, and then they burn differently. And here we are still talking about wildfires and LGBTQ rights in Florida.

And the thing about language—about ideas—is they’re alive. That’s why people get scared of them. Because once they’re out, you can’t get them back in the box. They spread like smoke under a door. Can’t be held still. That’s the power, and also the danger.“