Warbrained

Nick Quan’s song “Heavensafe,” which runs big feelings through a bigger pedalboard, features a funny declaration: “I’ve turned to slop again.” This past August, when the extraordinary guitarist released Warbrained, shoegaze might have been saying so, too. By then, its latest—and most puzzling—progeny was “cloud rock,” a budding vanguard that subverted its central extremes: numbness first, and noise, if at all, second. On record, Quan, a digi-rock savant who has toured with Slowdive, sounds groggy yet ridiculously technical, like a sleep-deprived Berklee student on a bender.

When a simplistic song, “life imitates life,” blew up on TikTok in 2023, they responded with a complex album, that year’s Stepdream, whose own songs warranted new fingers: for us, to count the chords, and for Quan, probably, to play them. This wasn’t shoegaze, but an inchoate facsimile, spewing disparate iterations—scuzzy, tender, tired, alive—like a sputtering machine. Much like shoegaze in the 2020s, it seemed unsure of what it was, and more so, what it was becoming.

No longer a teenage wunderkind, Quan, who performs as quannnic, looks something like a patron saint for cloud rock, a digicore OG whose early tapes have become ur-texts. But where debut album Kenopsia was muted and follow-up Stepdream was mutative, Warbrained, their latest, is disarmingly mimetic: forwardly ’90s-borne, and far too well studied, too well done, to feel derivative. In their pastiche of golden-era alt rock, quannnic plays a grizzled vet, wary of the race to Make Shoegaze Slop Again. Who can channel My Bloody Valentine in the most Dean Bluntian way? Make desire sound the most disaffected? Be the Shiner to my Stina Nordenstam? Not quannnic, at least not at the moment: “I worked a miracle,” they sing on “Paperweight,” and then, later, “nothing special.” The basics can be beautiful when you have the chops.

Of course, the “basics” of shoegaze are never truly basic at all—it takes a lot of stuff to sound utterly alone. Since Kenopsia, quannnic has more eagerly foregrounded raw instrumentation, and as of Warbrained, found a Goldilocks zone between orchestral density and easy listening. Often, a quannnic song is an amoebic thing, morphing as if deciding on a final form in real time. Restless energy simmers here, but in service of sturdy songcraft: Sickly guitar feedback adds worlds to the sparse verses of “Wrenches,” while on “Observer,” laser-beam licks notch a drunken, stuporous balance with sunwashed minor chords. The thrill of bedroom rock lies in simulating multiple musicians as one person—lay down a guitar track, pan it to one ear; lay down another, pan it to the other; repeat until satisfied. By introducing, and occasionally prioritizing, synthetic instrumentation, digi-rock buries a lot of this tactile, noisy-cellar entropy in mathematical programming—which isn’t necessarily a crime. But when I hear a pummeling stomper like “Floorface,” whose layered downpicks land like punches, I feel relieved: not because Quan has never used analog instruments before, but because they’ve never sounded this gloriously, moshably corporeal. Unionized air guitarists of the world, the strike is over.

Still, what makes Warbrained particularly smart is the space MIDI and DAWs do occupy, even if not front and center. A very cool mix, of which there are many here, requires thinking outside of binaries—can a sub-bass work in conjunction with a bass guitar, rather than replace it? Must a synthesizer always militaristically follow the chord progression? Listen closely to the brooding “Wardeath,” or the beatific “Prunesnail,” and you can hear answers everywhere: drifting keys that imbue clipping tremolo with feeling, or colorful bursts that simulate a guitar toppling over while plugged in. “Polyphonic perception” is an easy thing to claim. Making it so easy to access, like Warbrained does, is much more difficult, and much more rewarding.

“Prunesnail” is particularly disarming: it almost feels too hopeful, too cherubic, for the corner of digital music Quan has long occupied. If deadAir label-mates Photographic Memory and Jane Remover embody opposite sides of a spectrum—the former, rock-as-remix; the latter, rock-as-rage—quannnic sits snugly in between: digicore-indebted, bleary-eyed, really fucking shredding. “Cloud rock” was born in the same hospital as hyperpop, and along with its fellow pandemic baby, it now faces a certain challenge—adjusting to a less insular, more physical world. “Prunesnail” is physical in all the ways a peppy, percussive song should be. But it’s also physical for its premise, which scans the haze of cloud rock and announces, from track one: This music needs a body. The body it gets on Warbrained is gestating, grunting, bruised, bleeding. But it’s breathing, too, and for shoegaze, it’s a breath of fresh air.