Ganser

Art school, The Residents, and a rhythm section that stuck

Ganser started with two people who met at art school in Chicago: keyboardist and vocalist Nadia Garofalo and bassist and vocalist Alicia Gaines, who found common ground in The Residents and in the films of John Waters and David Lynch. That shared taste for the deadpan and the uncanny explains a lot about what the band later sounded like — the humour sits underneath the dread rather than beside it. Drummer Brian Cundiff and guitarist Charlie Landsman completed the first full line-up, and the group's management biography describes the result as post-punk construction with noise-rock weight, built from imagist language and cinematic framing rather than slogans.

The early run was quick. A debut EP, This Feels Like Living, arrived in 2016, and the first full-length, Odd Talk, followed in 2017. By then the Chicago connection was doing real work: the band came up in a city with a deep noise-rock lineage and a studio culture to match, and both show up in the records. Gaines handles the artwork as well as the bass, which has kept the visual identity under the band's own control from the start — a detail that matters later, when she starts directing their videos too.

Odd Talk, Just Look at That Sky, and a remix record

Just Look at That Sky, released in 2020, is the record that moved Ganser from a local concern to something covered nationally. Rolling Stone, Paste, Vice and Bandcamp all picked it up; The New York Times reached for Gang of Four and Siouxsie and the Banshees as reference points, which is accurate as far as the guitar writing and the vocal delivery go, if a little tidy about how strange the band could be.

What they did next was less conventional. Rather than tour an album into the ground through a period when touring was difficult, they gave it away to other people. Look at the Sun, in 2021, is a remix collection built from the Just Look at That Sky material, with contributions from GLOK, Sad13, Algiers, Bartees Strange and Girl Band's Adam Faulkner. It functions as a map of the company Ganser were keeping — electronic, confrontational, art-leaning — and as a hedge against repeating themselves. The Nothing You Do Matters EP followed in the same stretch.

Then came the long gap. Five years separate Just Look at That Sky from the next full-length, and the band that emerged on the other side was not the band that went in.

Animal Hospital: a new line-up and a Liars producer

Animal Hospital came out on 29 August 2025 through Felte, and the credits tell the story of the interval. Garofalo and Landsman were no longer in the group. The core had become a trio of Gaines on bass and vocals, Cundiff on drums, and Sophie Sputnik on vocals, synth and guitar. Landsman and Dove Hollis appear as studio contributors. Reviewers noticed that Sputnik's synth work had shifted the centre of gravity away from the guitar-forward arrangements of the older albums.

The record was made at Jamdek Studios in Chicago in the early months of 2025, produced by Angus Andrew of Liars with the band, engineered and mixed by Doug Malone, with additional recording by Nick Broste at Electrical Audio and mastering by Barry Grint at AIR. Gaines did the art direction and the cover illustration. Twelve tracks, most of them under three and a half minutes, with the six-minute closer 'Left to Chance' as the outlier — and the place where Andrew's involvement is most audible, in the wonky electronics that take the album out.

The band's own framing of the album is about observation and stray thoughts: material accumulated in notebooks over years and then assembled rather than written to order. Critics read it as a deliberate retooling rather than a reset. Spectrum Culture scored it 79 per cent in September 2025, crediting a decade of accumulated craft and singling out 'Black Sand' for how it builds, with 'Creature Habits', 'Half Plastic' and 'Plato' supplying the uptempo counterweight, while noting the band still sounded like work in progress. Elsewhere the album was received as the point where dream pop, shoegaze and no-wave stopped being separate settings in Ganser's hands.

Where things stand in autumn 2026

Ganser spent the first part of 2026 keeping Animal Hospital in motion rather than moving on from it. An expanded Animal Hospital (Deluxe Edition) appeared in April 2026, and the band toured Europe earlier in the year — a trip Gaines has described as leaving their sense of time distorted once they were dropped back into Chicago.

That dislocation became the next single. 'Futuretripping' was released on 10 September 2026 on Felte, the first new music since the 2025 album, with a video directed by Gaines and cover art she has styled after mid-century advertising. The credits list Gaines on vocals and bass, Cundiff on drums, Dove Hollis and Charlie Landsman on guitar, and Gaines and Cundiff on keys; the song was written and arranged by the two of them, mixed by Nick Broste and mastered again by Barry Grint. Stereogum, covering the release, described Ganser as the duo of Gaines and Cundiff — a line-up description the band has not contradicted — and praised Gaines's writing for being quotable without showing off about it.

Cundiff's gloss on the track is the most concise statement of what Ganser do: an agitation that it is not tomorrow yet, combined with wanting more of today. The band's self-applied genre tag, 'falling elevator music', covers similar ground.

Three days after the single, they went back out as a support act. Songkick currently lists no upcoming shows, with the 14 September 2026 Salt Shed date logged as their most recent performance and around 1,900 users tracking them for announcements. One date is on sale at the time of writing.

The company they keep on stage

Ganser have built their live reputation almost entirely as an opener, and the list of headliners is unusually coherent: Idles, Mclusky, Amyl and the Sniffers, Bikini Kill, Oh Sees, Viagra Boys, Bartees Strange and Modern English. Reviewers have argued that the run of support slots sharpened the band's angles, which is a fair reading — the arrangements on Animal Hospital are shorter and more direct than those on Just Look at That Sky, and they are built to work on a crowd that has not come to see them.

The Bikini Kill relationship goes back furthest. Ganser opened for them at the Salt Shed in Chicago on 22 April 2023, then as a four-piece of Landsman on guitar, Cundiff on drums, Gaines on bass and vocals, and Sputnik — then a recent addition — on synths and lead vocals. The JBTV review of that night described a main floor packed to the back and a crowd dancing in place through the opening set, and characterised the sound as a dense wall of guitars and rhythmic drumming with melody finding room to breathe through the mix. They did it again in September 2026 on a four-date run: Turner Hall Ballroom in Milwaukee on the 13th, the Salt Shed in Chicago on the 14th, Royal Oak Music Theatre on the 15th and the Agora in Cleveland on the 17th.