don’t speak,
don’t say it,
if you put in the air I might catch it
Ganser is a band that writes as if mere observation itself were an art form: snatched remarks from sidewalks, overheard murmurs in dive bars, half-formed philosophies scribbled in a notebook between cities. On Animal Hospital, the Chicago quartet frames those fragments as a liturgy of contradictions—life on the move. Life standing still. Life arranged in rhythms that thud, scrape, and spiral until they turn distraction into design.
Sophie Sputnik’s guitar slices like neon wire, Alicia Gaines’ bass digs trenches, Brian Cundiff drives rhythms forward with a steady insistence. Recorded at Jamdek Studios with Angus Andrew of Liars presiding, the album feels like an edifice built from scattered notes dating back years, finally assembled into something towering. With Charlie Landsman and Dove Hollis bolstering the record in the studio, Ganser sounds both anchored and volatile, a group tuned to fracture and cohesion in equal measure.
Album opener Black Sand ignites the LP with percussion that doesn’t ask but commands. The song bursts into the room and points at the exits. stripe follows with a sudden dream pop sway. Gaines trades propulsion for patience, her voice languid, eyes half-closed, as though she’s dancing in the half-light of a room where time forgets itself. With the song’s jangly guitars and percussion, the duet of vocals shapes the atmosphere into a conversation: past selves, future selves, and the stubborn present colliding.
The band’s palette ten stretches wide: Ten Miles Tall, in fact, which leans into serrated guitars and recalls the art-punk sneer of downtown no wave. Dig Until I Reach the Moon drapes trip-hop unease over jazzed intervals, a shadowplay of Massive Attack and Portishead refracted through Ganser’s claustrophobic humour. Grounding Exercises dissolves into something more spectral: Radiohead’s The Bends caught in a fever, basslines murmuring like ghosts under floorboards.
When Sputnik growls her way through Half Plastic, the record shakes with pure punk voltage. “I hold my breath till I see spots,” she snarls, and the line feels less like memory than a live shock. Speaking of the Future rattles with jazzy percussion, cymbals skittering across eerily sustained chords. Then Creature Habits kicks the door down in Bikini Kill fashion, a feral release.
If Lounger nods towards shoegaze and Britpop haze, Discount Diamonds hurls itself at the dancefloor with indie/no-wave, post-punk funk. The drums bounce with narcotic regularity while Gaines seethes, “kids don’t dance anymore.” The irony of the line is obliterated by the rhythm itself: a rallying cry for those still willing to move, still willing to sweat under the strobe of contradiction.
Then the knife-twist: Plato, all angles and agitation, guitar strafing across a rhythm section that refuses to wobble. No-wave tension meets classroom provocation; the band argues by tone and timbre, not thesis. Left to Chance closes the set like a ritual broadcast: motorik thrum, glassy keys, and a hook that feels telegraphed from some archival BBC sci-fi cue. It’s a spell cast in plain sight.
Animal Hospital is out now via Felte Records on physical media and all digital platforms. Listen to the album below and order it here.
Touring alongside IDLES, Mclusky, Bikini Kill, and Amyl & The Sniffers has only sharpened their angles. On Animal Hospital, Ganser compresses absurdity and clarity into rhythm. The contradictions remain, but here they’re danceable, undeniable, alive.
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