quannnic: 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."

"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."

Quannnic's third album Warbrained foregrounds analog power and '90s shoegaze influences, trading digicore digitality for tangible, guitar-driven textures. The record intensifies pedalboard excess and corporeal sonics while retaining technical precision and a groggy, lived-in feel. A previous TikTok hit, "life imitates life," preceded the denser, more complex Stepdream; Warbrained instead pursues studied pastiche of golden-era alt rock without collapsing into mere derivative imitation. The musician navigates homage and originality, positioning themselves between cloud rock's numbness and noise, and offering a back-to-basics, tactile alternative to contemporary digicore trends.

Read at Pitchfork