West Midlands two-piece GANS' self-titled second album. Produced by YOUTH at his studio in southern Spain earlier this year, musically revealing a much more expansive sound leaning deeper into a world of electronic music.

Meeting at college through a shared love of music, books and art, GANS began an intensive period of writing and rehearsing in late 2023, determined to make uncompromising music on their own terms.

Drawing on everything from big band jazz and country to techno and punk, GANS operate in a genre-free world: noisy, melodic, experimental and always with something to say.

In 2026, the band headed to rural Holland to write before travelling to the Spanish hills near Granada to record with producer Youth. The result is GANS at their most expansive yet: deeper into electronic music, more ambitious in sound, but rooted in the honesty, love and raw energy that has defined them from the start.

TRACK LISTING

1. AT PEACE
2. OVER AGAIN
3. DO YOU GLOW?
4. MAKE ME WEAK
5. MY GOD IS A STRANGER
6. ARCHIE’S DAY
7. STEP PSYCHOSIS
8. I FEEL CONNECTED
9. LOVE HAS CHANGED
10. ROADTRIPPING

Across their upcoming debut album 'GOOD FOR THE SOUL', GANS tackles subjects of acceptance, self-destruction, and body image. Informed by a shared love of painting, literature, and poetry in particular, GANS is where all of these concepts coalesce, in the hive-mind of songwriters Euan Woodman (drums, vocals) and Thomas Rhodes (bass, vocals)

TRACK LISTING

1. A FOOL
2. IN TIME
3. IT'S JUST LIFE
4. NIGHTWALKING
5. FAR AND WIDE
6. EVERYTHING IN EXTREME
7. I THINK I LIKE YOU
8. THE KING'S HEAD
9. THIS PRODUCT
10. OH GEORGE
11. WELL DONE

The right songs, strung together, give a revitalized vision of our surroundings, as if fresh eyes can be granted by rhythm alone, find new shapes for the weathered wireframe of the world and see the shadows as they dance with the light of day. 'Animal Hospital', the new LP from Chicago art punks Ganser, is a monument to observation, a tome of stray thoughts gathered while moving through a crowd coalesced into a collective take on the absurd contradictions of lives moving past.

'Animal Hospital' is Ganser at their most dynamic, stretching the confines of their sonic boundaries into new territory, testing the elastic limits of sound. The core of the band, Alicia Gaines, Sophie Sputnik, and Brian Cundiff, remain 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.

What has been gathered here is a collection of observations, recollections of the minutes that turned to days spent witnessing the humanity within people shift and spin in new directions. People changed stripes and spots, or maybe they just revealed the marks they always held. Lives became held at a distance. Masks pulled tight. There’s a profundity to be found in exploring the the surreal truths lurking in our hearts, that the sad and the mundane can play so effortlessly with the absurd and beautiful to make something haunting, something striking, songs that sting and soar and beg you to dance all at once.

Recorded at Jamdek Studios by Doug Malone (with additional recording by Nick Broste at Electrical Audio) and produced in partnership with longtime collaborator Angus Andrews (Liars) between January and March of 2025, Animal Hospital is a masterwork of Ganser’s long-honed craft. Songs that began life as notes scratched as far back as 2020 (save for 'Stripe', a demo reworked from 2001) that have been honed and committed here to tape, pressed into wax. Ganser has built their sound out, constructed walls that tower to new heights, joined on the record by Charlie Landsman and Dove Hollis to shore up the foundation.

Time on the road with artists like IDLES, Mclusky and Ted Leo, alongside shows with Amyl & The Sniffers, Bikini Kill, Viagra Boys and so many more have only sharpened the indelible talent that lurks in all corners of Ganser’s work, 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.

TRACK LISTING

1. Black Sand
2. Stripe
3. Ten Miles Tall
4. Dig Until I Reach The Moon
5. Grounding Exercises
6. Half Plastic
7. Speaking Of The Future
8. Creature Habits
9. Lounger
10. Discount Diamonds
11. Plato
12. Left To Chance

RIYL: Sleater-Kinney, Bartees Strange,Liars, Shellac, Blonde Redhead, Protomartyr, Iceage, A Place To Bury Strangers, Throwing Muses, Omni, Shopping, Bikini Kill.

In the era of Ganser’s Just Look At That Sky delightfully descended on the world in July of 2020, I do admit that I mostly did find myself looking skyward, though that looking was often colored by an ever-present anxiety. My city was coming apart and maybe your city was coming apart too. Maybe atop the buildings of your downtowns there were guns, and men in fatigues. Maybe in front of the libraries, there were tanks, maybe in front of the food banks, there were army patrols. And yet, maybe you found an album or some tunes that reflected the times, which means both everything and nothing at all now, as time fractures into small, elastic shapes, some jagged, some joyful. An album of a moment must require malleability – songs that hold several songs within them.

Ganser is back with a couple of tunes that will anchor spring through fall, a project called Nothing You Do Matters (produced by Liars' Angus Andrew) and the songs are full, biting, sweet and relentlessly tongue-in-cheek. What propels Ganser as a band, for me, is what shines here: their performance of joyful apathy so often has many other moving parts underneath that suggest that they are a band of deep caring, simply unsatisfied

with the hands they’ve been dealt by the world. The dark humor seeped into the apathy is the central and most visual part of the magic trick, but it isn’t the trick itself. It is the disappearing bird or rabbit, that which returns safely to the open palm in order to distract an audience from everything else unfolding during its

disappearance. “People Watching” is almost a mini-suite of a jam, which first kicks in your door and then lulls you with what feels like comfort, before tearing your place apart on the way out. It’s a thrasher of a tune that is more deliberate than breathless, picking its spots to twist the lyrical knife of talk until the words lose meaning, which circle the drain of the song repeatedly, until it has evicted you, or you have evicted it.

“What Me Worry?” fills the space of breathlessness, a sneering romp where each line of lyric feels engaged in a mighty tug-ofwar for what comes before and after, simmering with the kind of tension that Ganser has gotten great at – a tension that pushes a listener to the edge before dragging them back to firm ground.

Survival is hard-won. For many folks, it has always been, for many more folks it feels especially hard-won now. Ganser has adjusted to the times. Yes, the lyrics are darker, seem more exhausted with the realities of having to make it to whatever is next. But there’s also real bursts of playfulness and gratitude wrestling underneath these songs. Gratitude for what winning another inch of survival, perhaps. I needed these songs, and you might, too. It’s good to feel, for a moment, that all is not lost. And even if it is, at least we can laugh our way to somemeaningless demise. - written by Hanif Abdurraqib

TRACK LISTING

01. People Watching
02. What Me Worry
03. People Watching (Liars Remix)

Growth with no reward. Finding strength in your less desirable traits. Coming up with the perfect comeback hours later in bed, glaring at the ceiling. Asking yourself: am I improving, or am I just changing into something unrecognizable? Chicago quartet Ganser probe the futility of striving for self-growth during the chaos of our times for dark comedy and jagged sounds on their potent new LP, Just Look at That Sky. Equal parts Space Odyssey and Ghost World, Ganser released their debut LP Odd Talk in 2018 to favorable coverage from The New York Times, Billboard, and Stereogum. Building on their dissociative disorder namesake, the album’s tone vacillated between frenzied and contemplative, probing on questions of communication, intimacy, and avoidance.

On Just Look at That Sky, Ganser further explores the personal inner climate of uncertain times. Opening track “Lucky” announces an explosive energy that evokes the Midwest noise-rock legacy of bands like Jesus Lizard and Shellac, while embracing a more colorful palette of post-punk and art rock influences. Nadia Garofalo and Alicia Gaines, a self-described two-headed monster who share lead vocal duties, can bring both a recalcitrant cool worthy of Kim Gordon and a booming sneer that recalls Poly Styrene; the discordant interplay of Charlie Landsman’s guitar and Brian Cundiff’s drums on standouts “Self Service” and “Bad Form” build to blistering climaxes that wouldn’t feel out of place on Red Medicine-era Fugazi. And then there’s Ganser’s lyrics: manic explorations of worry and dread mark this record, the epic messiness of daily life in our damaged times attacked with sardonic specificity as often as generalized doom. Just Look at That Sky isn’t afraid to acknowledge that we’re all Extremely Online all the time, but rather explicitly owns it.

These songs chart inner monologues of emphatic confusion, emotions already deeply felt further ratcheted up by the anxiety of always having too much information about other people, and always being just one tweet or status update away from knowing what everyone really thinks about us. This culminates in closing track “Bags for Life,” which imagines how online discourse might tackle a front-row seat for the end of the world. These are songs that never shy away from ugliness and confusion, that believe embracing the totality of the self sometimes means leaning into our dickish behavior. In the past, some listeners have had trouble reconciling non-male voices with the sorts of topics Ganser writes about, but that comes to an end with Just Look at That Sky. Co-produced with Electrelane's Mia Clarke and engineer Brian Fox, this is an assured, fully realized triumph of a record from an art-punk band that’s figured out how to focus on making great art, even if everything else around them falls apart.

TRACK LISTING

1. Lucky
2. Self Service
3. Projector
4. Emergency Equipment & Exits
5. Told You So \
6. Just Look At That Sky
7. Shadowcasting
8. Bad Form
9. [NO YES]
10. Bags For Life