Imaad Wasif

The guitarist and composer—known for his collaborations with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Lou Barlow as well as his tenure as frontman for ‘90s L.A.-based slowcore band Lowercase—has released Superconsciousness on his own imprint, Voidist Records.

Written and recorded between 2022 and 2025, the ten-song set was shaped by an extraordinary convergence of personal upheaval: the death of family members, a major separation, displacement from his Altadena home in the 2025 wildfires. What emerged is less a document of trauma than a testament to what can be made from it.

We spoke with Wasif on release day—he'd been up late, wrestling with insomnia and anxiety—about transmutation, the cost of compromise, and why "Believe" makes strangers clap.

Analogue: I read that this album was made against a backdrop of real personal upheaval. Are you comfortable defining what was going on?

Imaad Wasif: I think at this point in my life I'm finding myself at a juncture of many different things—kind of dealing with the departure of life, like with members of my family. And then also I have a child as well. And I've kind of gone through this sort of big separation in my life as well. And it's all happened at the same time as being displaced from the fires in Altadena. So it's like there's a lot going on that could have normally made me crumble.

I'm a person that's kind of struggled with an inability to not fall into these pits of kind of self-loathing and depression, as I know that a lot of people struggle with. But really, I think the point of my album was to transmute that into something that wasn't about the indulgence in it, but about an awareness of it. And really how to create something that was an homage to the things that are beautiful about all these things, rather than feel this sort of darkness, like let that darkness overtake me.

I've just realized that that's something that is actually very important for us as people in this world, who are all dealing with the state of the world as well now, to really come into themselves and feel that they can give from a pure place. Because it's really all we can do as individuals right now. You feel powerless otherwise. But this is the one instance of something that I actually do and work on and create that I feel I can impart those ideas into. And even if it's like one person coming back to me and saying it resonated with them, it's a really huge deal for me.

Analogue: I want to start with this idea of transmutation that runs through the record. Is that easily found for you, or is it more like faking it till you make it?

Imaad: Yeah, no—you feel like you're suffering through this imposter syndrome the whole time, because it takes so much work to actually believe in what you're doing and to not allow all of the negative patterning and all the negative voices to come in and cause you to fail and cause you to not see something through. And really, for me, especially with this record, it's miraculous to me that this record exists now, coming out of what I was dealing with last year. It really is a beautiful signifier to me that I was able to complete this phase in my life.

Analogue: You started your own label for this one. Did that freedom change anything in the actual songcraft?

Imaad: I'm learning how to compartmentalize different parts of myself now. On this record, there were no compromises. I don't need approval from anyone. I just need to actually go to the space within myself where I can align the initial vision, because the beautiful thing you're always chasing is when you write a song and feel completed on it, even in its demo phase, you lose that in the process somewhere. And for this album, I knew I wanted all the songs to have a kind of maximal realization. I didn't want them to be scrappy. I just wanted them to be pure, and to retain that purity in the entire process. I've made so many records in my life where, in the evolution of the record, somehow things get derailed and it becomes something else that didn't stay true to what the original vision was. This time it was all on my terms, on my time, on my budget. I just really saw it through.

Analogue: Is there a song most representative of that?

Imaad: I think "Believe" was one that I knew. That song had many different lives with me. I wrote it and started touring it before I recorded it. And no matter where I played it, people had this sort of universal reaction. Maybe I'm going to say 100% of the time, they would start clapping along to it at some point. I'd never had a song that created that kind of connection with people.

I've also gotten an additional amount of—I'm not gonna say hate, but people recoiling from the sentiment in the song, because they think it's disingenuous. Like, I can't possibly be calling for belief in self at this time, when everything is so nebulous in the world. But for me, if we can't have an instance of faith or belief in ourselves and actually maintain that, I don't see what the point is, really. I wanted that song to have—alongside "Hunters" and "Over New Land" and "Weightless"—a sense of the duality, or multiple dimensions of texture and sound. I wanted all the songs to have the yin and the yang, both sides of myself, because I often operate in extremes, and I wanted that to be represented in the record.

Analogue: How purposeful is that vision ahead of time? Does the concept create the album, or do you find the threads as you collect things?

Imaad: I think it's different for each album. Initially I thought I was going to make a super raw record, just live and direct. But I think the vision needs to be allowed to change as you're working. When you get too tightly fixed on something too early on, you really limit yourself. I've had things come out that are like a direct channel and they just immediately feel right and I don't have to overthink it. And I just never want anything to feel belabored, because then it loses the ease and the timelessness of it. Like, you can tell when something was a really hard record for someone. I also—I'm getting used to talking about my work, which I used to shy away from, because it's difficult to articulate and you feel like it gets misunderstood. But now I realize that as a completely independent, autonomous artist, no one's going to do that for me.

Analogue: Take me into the closing track, "Over New Land." Was it always going to anchor the album?

Imaad: Totally. And weirdly, I think it was one of the first songs I wrote. I just knew it was going to close the record, which is so strange. Somewhere in my mind it is like that early Brian Wilson song, "In My Room," meets something off of Eno’s Another Green World. That really just having a kind of sinister lullaby; it’s in that zone, but it's not. I'm talking about loss of love there, and then also moving on into a recognition of that love, and a recognition of us as people in the universe sharing those kinds of feelings toward one another. It was recorded through many different mediums—part of it on my laptop, part in a studio, maybe even a voice memo on my phone. It's very mutated. But I love that feeling. It has this kind of warped thing going on in it.

Analogue: You've always spun different musical plates. What does that look like in 2026?

Imaad: Right now I'm trying to tie in a lot of these things. My first band was Lowercase, kind of very angsty, slowcore music. We broke up 26 years ago. And weirdly, like three days after the fires, we were asked to play a show at this theater downtown with this band called Brainiac that we used to tour with in the ‘90s. I was feeling so frantic and insane at that point, just dealing with the immediate post-traumatic effects of the fire. And I was like, ‘Okay, yeah, I'll do it.’

All along in my mind I was like, ‘Am I still the person that wrote these songs 26 years ago?’ And I realized that in relearning the songs, I realized I was actually writing for the person that I am now. It doesn't matter what iteration of me exists—they're all the same person. And these teenagers come to the shows and they have T-shirts and CDs, and I'm like, ‘How is this even possible?’ So we've been writing new music with that project, and we're going to do our first Pacific Northwest tour in June. It's like, what kind of reality have I stepped into?

And I'm already in this other zone working on new songs for Superconsciousness. I don't know exactly what shape those are going to take yet. And with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, we did a tour last summer that was really beautiful, reimagining the catalog with symphonic elements. One of my rock dreams was to play the Royal Albert Hall, which we did, which was insane. I think there'll be a live record from that show. But they're not touring this year, so yeah—it's just trying to stay in the work for myself. Connecting to self. What is my imprint on this world? What am I leaving? How can I continue to be true to that and not just disappear, not get swallowed up by the tide of insanity that we're all swimming through right now.

VISIT: Imaad Wasif

Photo: Robin Laananen