You just released your new EP Nothing You Do Matters and these songs mark the first songs that you’ve written since the pandemic began. What is your songwriting process like? How has it changed since the pandemic or has it changed at all?

Alicia: This project started out as a bedroom project between Nadia and I and our process kinda evolved out of that. There was a lot of always passing files back and forth and whatnot, not necessarily jamming in the room. So when Charlie [Landsman, guitarist] and Brian [Cundiff, drums] joined the group it kinda just expressed itself in songwriting pairs a lot of the time. Usually two people will get together and the mix of those people’s sensibilities will inform the song before bringing in the rest of the group. When it comes to lyrics, we’re pretty flexible. Sometimes Nadia will write lyrics that she sings or I will write the lyrics that I sing. Sometimes we write lyrics together and sometimes we write lyrics that fit the other person’s voice better for a song. There are songs that I sing that Nadia wrote the lyrics for and vice versa. I think the thing with the pandemic and how it changed our songwriting process is whereas we used to write remote by choice it became not a choice. [laughs] Which kinda changed the colour of how we were working. So I’m eager to get back in the room together and I feel like I embrace that a little bit more.

Nadia: Yeah, when you just don’t have that option I think it makes things a little more difficult. There are songs that you do hit a stopping point in the writing process with how much you can do remotely and you have to really get in the room and work it out in the room. Just play what we have and see what fits and see what it sounds like. That’s the only thing that would take a little longer or things would have to be like, “ok pause this until we’re able to meet up”.

Alicia: Yeah. Right now, we’re assembling demos for our next record and some of these demos are from quarantine, similarly to the new EP. But we’ve had to dust them off, take them into our practice space, re-record things while next to each other. [laughs] It kinda breathed new life into the songs being able to do that.

What’s the biggest difference between working on a song remotely and working on a song all together?

Alicia: Growing up as an only child I had to entertain myself a lot so I’m very comfortable sitting working on a song for hours late at night. I think it’s more like play when you’re in the room with somebody else. It’s much more social in that way.

Nadia: For me, I really like to be collaborative. So whereas I like to have the freedom to come up with things on my own and come up with ideas, at a certain point I really appreciate the back and forth of working with someone even if it’s not in person. It’s certainly nicer when you’re in person because I feel like there’s more of an energy exchange, you can pick up on more subtle things that you wouldn’t remotely or you can’t in emails.

Alicia: I guess one other thing that’s kinda fun is we keep a lot of documents around online that we use to collaborate and share when we are remote. We’ve done that since before the pandemic. For example, there’s a lyrics document that we have that Naida and I and sometimes Charlie will add things to. They’re just lines that don’t have a home and it could be something that you overheard at a party, it could be a line of ad copy that reads strange or looks like a song lyric, it could be a random thought that you had or a line from a poem in Nadia’s case. What’s cool is that if you’re working alone and you look at that document you kinda see everybody’s brain spilled out onto a page with zero context. That game of telephone is not necessarily a bad thing. We kind of rip off of that a lot.

Is there anything off the new EP that was taken off the file?

Nadia: I think a lot of it. [laughs] I think a lot of the lyrics or the way the ideas came were some of those like pulling things and seeing how they worked in the context of the concept of the songs for sure.

In 2021 you released a remix EP called Look At The Sun and on your new EP you have a remix of “People Watching” that was done by Liars. What is your favourite part of having people remix your songs?

Alicia: I think the lack of control, as somebody who is kinda a control freak in some ways. I think it took us being in the pandemic and connecting with people that we had some kind of relationship with online through the pandemic. That was kinda our criteria for choosing people. We didn’t want to just randomly go pick people, it was people who we’d made internet friends with over the pandemic. First off having the confidence to actually ask these people to do it and having them say yes was huge. I don’t know if we would’ve done that before. And then that directly translates to us working with Angus [Andrew] from Liars. It was a cold email just purely based upon what we perceived as a shared sensibility and him actually saying yes was so wild and him producing the entire EP was kind of a magical experience. It only seemed natural to have him do a remix.

What was it like working with him on the EP?

Nadia: Angus is great. It was really fun to work with someone who brought a very different energy and experimental thought process to it. I mean, we definitely have our own experimental sensibilities but he kind of came from a different perspective. Years of doing it and his experience in the way he works with things, the way he layers stuff, the way he thinks about structures of songs and what’s possible and what can fill the space was just really refreshing. It was cool to work with someone who was like, “ok but what if we pushed this a little further or did this differently”. Certainly we didn’t always agree on every decision but it was still awesome to have those ideas out there.

Alicia: Normally when we record vocals it’s usually Nadia or myself in the booth alone. Sometimes when we’ve done songs with co-vocals we’ll sing back and forth at each other for a couple of takes.

Nadia: Yeah, we’ve done that a couple of times.

Alicia: But we’ve never done it where we’ve had a producer in the room like Angus. You can imagine him being like a cheerleader while you’re doing a vocal take and it was like, “wow, I can’t believe this is actually happening right now!” Just for the surreal fact of a guy who is 6’4” looming over you and cheering you on. [laughs] It was a cool experience.

Nadia: Yeah and on some of the takes you can kinda hear it. Not in the final, not in anything that’s on the EP but when you listen to the raw files you can kinda hear it a little bit. [laughs]

Alicia: I think it’s really special to share your work because I’ve loved Liars for a very long time and the fact that he got to hear our demos, that’s kinda like somebody reading your diary. Walking into the room in the studio, it took me a minute to realize, “oh yeah, duh, of course he knows all the lyrics to these songs that aren’t even close to being released yet”. We recorded this in November of 2021. So you can imagine all this information is private to us and then to have him and our engineer Brian Fox be the first people to know it and know it inside and out is crazy. It was really special to have it be our thing for a weekend.

That’s so good to have somebody there who’s really into it! Are there any songs that you want to remix Ganser-style?

Alicia: I think we’d love to have another crack at it. Brian and I did a remix for A Place to Bury Strangers recently and that was the first time that we’d ever done a remix for someone else. It was a really natural process. We went out and asked people to do remixes for us during the pandemic and kinda in the same vein somebody did the same to us so at this point I think I’d just love another crack at it. It’s one thing to write a song and have to build a house from the ground up, it’s another thing to be handed a house and then you take it apart and you make it into something else. [laughs]

What’s the most rewarding thing when you finish a remix?

Alicia: When we finished the “I Need You” remix I think the thing that we really loved was when you hear someone else’s song you can usually pick out, “oh, I love how this line is delivered. Oh wow, I love that one part of the guitar part”. It’s another thing to get all the stems and really get into someone else’s process. For A Place to Bury Strangers I think the thing for us that was really cool was actually just taking all those guitars apart because there are so many layers of guitar in an A Place to Bury Strangers song that actually getting in there and examining it was kinda half the fun. It kinda felt like forensics. [laughs]

You shot the videos for “People Watching” and “What Me Worry?” with an LED Volume backdrop. What was it like working with this technology?

Nadia: That technology is really cool because it sort of gives you this, not infinite, but very flexible set backdrop. It’s almost like a 3D environment where it’s very reactive with the camera and the process was really interesting to be able to see. We went out to this physical place, a physical field, so we could shoot the first parts of the video and shoot a couple of exterior shots. Then our camera guy, our DP Matt Brown and [Producer and Virtual Production Supervisor] Andy Jarosz, went in and took very detailed pictures of the actual physical environment. Andy was able to piece it all together into this 3D-like reactive environment into the engine and it’s really cool. I think it’s a really great way for people to use technology to make visuals. Shooting outside in the Midwest during winter would be very difficult, much more costly, and much more uncomfortable for us. Also I don’t want to be buried in real dirt and I would imagine that Alicia feels the same way. So being able to control that more like: take this exterior, bring it inside, and be able to then build around that, you have more control. You’re able to work with it a little bit better.

Alicia: When we first talked to Angus the first thing that I told him was, “hey, looking at your discography you never seem to be satisfied with what you’re currently doing, you’re always doing something different with every single record. We’re kinda similar, we’re like malcontents in that way. We just don’t like doing the same thing twice, we like challenging ourselves”. I think these music videos are really emblematic of that because we don’t really concept music videos to necessarily make us look the coolest or with some of the motivations that other people have. I think for us we looked at this technology that some of our collaborators were developing and we were like, “wow! What can we do with that? How can we come up with an idea to show that off and also have two music videos that are related?” It was a huge challenge, it was a huge undertaking. We do a lot in terms of the set building and set making and props - that is Nadia’s speciality and she went in hard to do all that. Coming out of the back end of doing these two videos and getting all this footage together and me editing it, there’s always that moment where we’re like, “what have we done!? What have we gotten ourselves into? What is this hell of our own making?” But we would joke on set because it was extremely difficult, that we’re setting up a challenge for ourselves and I think that’s what we do every time. We would joke and lean over to the other person and just go, “you know, none of this matters. Nothing you do matters”. As in like, “is there something else you’d rather be doing?” because I’d have to keep telling myself that. Would I rather be watching TV on my couch? No. We’re doing something really cool here even though it’s really difficult. The LED Volume was rad. We did it in two different ways specifically to play with the technology. In the first music video, we’re really trying to fake a backdrop and make you feel like you were outside. So mixing shots with actual outside shots of the set to confuse that level of reality and for the second music video we basically tore it apart. I guess it’s kinda similar to the remix idea like with the second music video where we have an LED Volume that we could make realistically into a setting but what if we don’t care about that? What if we put abstract things back there, what if we do not try to actually fake a real environment? It was really fun to play with and it was extremely difficult. [laughs]

Nadia: And when we say “difficult” it’s also just like these are two music videos that were very involved and we shot it over a weekend. Well, the bulk of them were shot over a weekend with a couple of days for exterior or pick-up shots and it’s long work days. Honestly, as someone who works professionally in the film industry, we could’ve used a couple more days on those. The fact that we got all of that footage done for both of those videos in that one weekend was ambitious and the fact that we did it was a success. [laughs]

Alicia: Yeah, for sure. I think that’s something that people are starting to recognize. For us, we’re absolutely about the music first and being a band first. But at the same time, with us working in creative industries this is a way for us to do what we want on our own terms. We do all the design for the band, do our own music videos, edit our own music videos, assemble those crews and build those sets. We kind of put our hands on everything. I’m not going to say that it is as important as the music but I think it’s a very important part of who we are.

It goes hand in hand, the videos compliment the songs so well. Everything flows so well.

Alicia: Thank you. Sometimes I feel jealous of bands that can just kind of have someone direct the music video for them and come up with a concept and the band’s just along for the ride but has no say in what it is or how it looks. I think it would be easier.

[laughter]

Nadia: For us, we’re not necessarily interested in that. I think Ganser has always been a complete creative project for us. Here’s an opportunity for us to do all of these things and have a reason to do them. Alicia designs everything, all of the graphics that we have, anything visual that you’ve seen online or on our merch is all her doing. And a lot of posters. Being able to do that stuff, being able to make music videos and conceptualize the visuals like all of the album art is Alicia and all of that is us working to make everything a cohesive art project basically. [laughs] A cohesive thing in all elements.

Alicia: It’s been wild, especially over the pandemic when our last record Look At That Sky came out, I would be flabbergasted because somebody would follow us on Instagram and every once in a while I’ll go, “oh, what are they all about?”. Then it’s like, here’s this person in a different country and their header image or something that they just posted would be like “Ghost World” or it would be John Waters or something like that.

Nadia: Yeah, just things that we related to.

Alicia: I guess we shouldn’t be so surprised because we put ourselves into what we do. I’m always psyched to see that the people who like us like the things that we like. I know that sounds really simple but I think what it means is that our sensibility is getting across which is good.

Kinda like your vibe is just attracting everyone else on the same wavelength.

Nadia: Come to us other weirdos! [laughs]

Alicia: Totally, totally. It’s wild how that works and I think it really took the pandemic and being in quarantine to really see it. Before that we were just always on the move and playing DIY shows, just killing ourselves with a schedule that didn’t allow us to really look and see, “oh wow, I guess we are attracting fellow weirdos in our same vein”.

Do you feel that using the technology allowed you to be more creative? Would you use it again or recommend it for other bands to use?

Nadia: I think it gave us a very interesting problem to solve for sure. It’s so flexible but you have to have an idea that really requires a 3D environment that you need to build. For example, this is the kind of stuff they use for the Mandalorian to create that vast, open set but the stages are not that vast obviously. It depends what you’re going for in terms of recommending it for other people. We were using it in a way where a lot of the people’s time and a lot of resources were donated for the purpose of being able to show off the technology. I think there might be a cost barrier for sure. I work in the film industry and I think that helps us because there are people who are willing to work with us because of that.

Alicia: I think we got in just under the wire just because it is so new. We got to try it out and try it on different scales and stuff so I think everybody is kinda navigating how they work with it. I think it’s something that is really cool. It’s like a throwback to when you watch a movie from the 50s and they have a video playing behind somebody in a car on a set. It’s the same thing really, just a level up. So now it’s hard to watch TV and not notice scenes where it’s clearly being used like in the new Game of Thrones show. Once you use it, you can’t unsee it. [laughs]

In previous interviews you’ve mentioned that you always try to hide Easter eggs in everything you put out. What Easter eggs hidden in this release are you most proud of?

Alicia: I think everything from referencing MAD Magazine to the album artwork itself is kinda leaning into some stuff that we’ve been interested in recently which is kind of a cartoonish sensibility. I think it’s something that has been bubbling up in some artists recently, maybe because everything is so absurd. I’m eager to see how it turns out, we’ll see, but we’re supposed to have artwork pressed on the back of the vinyl that’s blank so there’s going to be a hidden animation element on the vinyl, potentially.

I hope it works!

Nadia: I think it will. If not, it’ll just look cool.

Alicia: We’re not afraid of failing. [laughs]

Nadia: It isn’t really a failure if it’s just like, “oh this is just a cool looking record now”. Whatever.

[laughter]

Alicia: Yeah we were just kinda joking when we were talking about the album cover and stuff. I think everything has just felt so overwhelming as of late. I was having a lot of chase dreams. So the idea of being chased by a bull came up, as a scary thing. Also right after that I watched the new Jackass movie. There’s a certain Looney-Toons-ness of the imagery of a matador and a bull that’s just so ridiculous to me but is very life and death.

It kinda ties into the title too, like a bull’s charging at you what are you going to do?

Alicia: It’s going to get you eventually.

Nadia: And if it doesn’t, whatever.

[laughter]

You once described your music as being “about worrying and laughing at your worrying”. What never fails to make you laugh?

Alicia: I think there is no better laughter than when you’ve been on tour and it’s usually around the middle when everybody breaks. Charlie can be incredibly charming and a really good bullshitter and some of the hardest times I’ve ever laughed in my life has been in the tour van in the middle of tour where we’re all a little bit punch-drunk, sleep deprived. That kind of laughter is the best, I think.

Nadia: Yeah, for sure.

The 3am energy.

Alicia: I think we get a lot of energy out of that and it’s starting to come back. I missed that a lot during the pandemic because there’s a certain amount of like I said, I can sit in my room all day and try to write some music and Nadia and I can text lyrics back and forth to each other, but there’s so many ideas that we come up with just purely being in that zone, driving through the middle of Kansas or whatever. There’s certain ideas like that where you have to be together for you guys to both notice things at the same time and be like, “wait a minute, that’s ridiculous right?”

Do you keep a notebook in the van like the online file you mentioned earlier?

Alicia: We have several docs that we’ll add to when we’re on the road. What’s nice is you’ll go revisit it when you’re home a month later and you might not remember what you were originally referring to. So you get to kinda look at it again for the first time. I think that’s maybe the biggest thing that I’ve tried to take on and something that if anyone were to ask I would recommend: pay attention to your thoughts and write a lot of them down.

What advice would you give to someone who is trapped in a cycle of worry?

Nadia: I think identifying why you were worried and what it is you’re afraid of and just writing it out, to be honest. A lot of the ways that I work through things personally in my life is by writing about it as a stream of consciousness. Maybe if it’s a scenario that you’re concerned about, write out how you think it might go in your head. Write out what you would want to say if there were no consequences or what you would want to do if there were no consequences. I think having some radical honesty with yourself could help you out of that cycle.

Alicia: Yeah, that’s really good advice. This new EP was in the can already and we’d already shot the music videos and we went to go see that movie Everything Everywhere All at Once and they say something to the effect of “nothing matters” and we turned to each other and laughed just because we were kinda like, “ha that’s kind of like a cousin to what we’re working on”. That movie has what Nadia is saying, which is if you worry so much you can paralyze yourself and that movie explores all the options in a multiverse of anything that could possibly happen. Sometimes you just have to play out those scenarios for yourself to actually move forward. I think the worst thing you could do is nothing so just figuring out how to keep that momentum going is important.

Just keep going.

Alicia: And also nothing you do matters so fuck it.

[laughter]

Yeah, just go for it!

Nadia: Within reason, as long as no one gets hurt you know. Don’t hurt anyone or yourself.

How would you describe the punk scene in Chicago?

Nadia: I feel like Chicago has a very good scene in a lot of ways. People are pretty supportive and willing to help each other in a way that I think is really awesome. In my experience, it’s been pretty positive.

Alicia: It’s also pretty eccentric. I think artists in Chicago are supportive by the fact that they are in the middle of the country and every big tour comes through Chicago. That was how we got our start. If we saw a band that we liked was playing at a venue, we would just send a very polite email to that venue asking if we could play and that was our way in. I think we’re free from a lot of the pressures that exist on the coasts like in LA and in New York. This is not me throwing shade, but you can always tell when a band from LA or New York comes through town because the attitude is different, they’re wearing leather jackets, they have costumes that look like rock stars. I think what they do is they land in Chicago or somewhere in the Midwest and they run into these folks who are maybe a little bit more relaxed about it, a little bit more, “hey, chill, you don’t need to wear a leather jacket. Let’s go get a hot dog.” [laughs] It’s just a different energy and that energy is not unique necessarily to Chicago but I think it’s the benefit of not being “The City”, you know, like in New York.

That makes sense. You recently Tweeted: “the wildest thing about being a band in Chicago is Billy Corgan is just out there somewhere”. What would you do if you were out walking and ran into him one day?

Nadia: I’ve been trying to make this happen since I got here! [laughs] And it’s never happened.

Alicia: We should go to his tea house, Madame ZuZu’s.

Nadia: I keep thinking about that but I don’t know if he is there all the time.

Alicia: I don’t know what the hell I would do if I ran into Billy Corgan because I feel like he represents a lot specifically in our band. We have a pretty wide age-range in our band so Brian, our drummer, is very much an older early Smashing Pumpkins fan. Whereas Nadia and I, we didn’t even get that music in real time. We got in years after it came out but we were heavily into Mellon Collie through Adore, right?

Nadia: Yeah.

Alicia: And that was a big part of our teenage years. We got into them when the band was breaking up.

Nadia: Yeah in like 2000. [laughs]

Alicia: And we didn’t live in Chicago, so we’d see them as this band from this place Chicago that I’ve never been to. Then suddenly we end up being in a band in Chicago and Brian and Charlie are both from Chicago. But Charlie is younger than us and has no relationship to the Pumpkins at all. I feel like we could roundtable on the Pumpkins for a long time just because we have such differing relationships to that band. If we run into Billy Corgan, I don’t know, I would probably thank him and then think I said something silly for the next few weeks.

Nadia: So when I moved to this city I drove with this in my car [holds up framed Smashing Pumpkins poster]. One of my friends got this on eBay, it was probably sent to her from New York because it’s a New York poster, and I’ve had it this whole time I’ve been in Chicago. Growing up my best friend and I, that was our favorite band and we were crazy. She especially was on eBay buying a bunch of stuff.

Alicia: People can knock on Pumpkins all day but they were special. I remember it was a beach family vacation and I picked up Mellon Collie from a record store at the beach purely because it stood out because it was a double CD. It was in a double jewel case and one of the CDs was blue and one of the CDs was pink and it had this really complex collage artwork. I didn’t know that I was going to be a graphic designer then but even with that I was like, “you can make a really long record and split it up by theme?” We could talk Pumpkins all day.

Their new album’s like 3 parts, isn’t it?

Nadia: Oh god, I don’t know. I got shamed by a couple of people at one of our last shows. I think it was college students and someone was wearing a Smashing Pumpkins shirt and I was like, “oh, I used to have that shirt! That’s awesome, that was my favourite band in high school!” And they were like, “What do you mean was?” and I’m like, “oh my god, it’s come back! It’s full circle”. [laughs] So I’m like, “oh I guess I need to catch up”.

There you go, opening tour slot right there.

Alicia: Billy Corgan can hit us up if he wants.

Nadia: Hit us up if you want, you know where to find us.

[laughter]

You never know. What are you listening to now?

Nadia: I feel like mostly the sound of my tinnitus. That’s a lot of what I listen to.

[laughter]

Nadia: I personally listen to a lot of podcasts. I think I’ve become my mom in that I’m getting really into talk radio. Podcasts essentially are the new talk radio where you can just choose the subject instead of listening to whatever’s on. I feel like for me there’s been a lot of that. There’s this one I really like called Criminal because it’s not super murder-y. [laughs] Some of the true crime ones get a little much for me.

Alicia: It can be in bad taste.

Nadia: It’s become spectacle and that’s where I’m just like, “ew no”. But this one, Criminal, is really great. They talk about crimes in general and some of them are really hilarious and ridiculous and some of them are like barely crimes and then some of them are serious crimes. It kind of runs the spectrum. That’s one of my favourite podcasts right now.

Alicia: I guess on the music front, I tend to bop around a lot because I think, like ourselves, we like some music that straddles genre and doesn’t really neatly fit into categories. There’s a lot of big post-punk bands that we like but there are a lot that you would be surprised that we don’t listen to just because it’s very straight down the middle, some guy shouting atonally. [laughs] But one that is really cool that I’ve been listening to is this band called Gladboy. They have this song “Karloff” that I really like. It’s about Boris Karloff and it’s really niche and weird. That’s one that I’ve been really liking a lot as of late. What’s really fun is that because we are four people that have some overlap but very much our own interests, I would kind of think of us as a Venn diagram, when we go on the road we’ll make these long playlists where anybody can throw anything in, so you’ll wind up with a playlist that’s 20 hours long that we’ll throw on shuffle when we go on the road. It’s the funniest thing because there will be The Birthday Party into TLC into some new indie act that we might be playing a show with later. It’s all over the place but I really enjoy the variety.

What’s next for Ganser?

Alicia: What’s next for us is practicing a lot of positivity because it’s not easy right now. Specifically because we’re working on demos for our next record and when you think about that and game plan it out, it’s like, let’s say tomorrow the record was done and we had all the songs written. We’d still have to go into the studio and there’s a vinyl shortage so the time that it takes for records to come out these days almost feels insurmountable but going back to what we were talking about earlier, so what are you going to do? Nothing? For us I think it’s like that old saying “how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time”. Right now it’s about making sure we’re doing little things all the time to see what we can do. Same goes for touring, it’s rough out there for touring bands. So right now we’re looking for tour support stuff for 2023 and hopefully we’ll have something to look forward to.

Are there any bands who you’re looking to take on tour or tour with?

Nadia: I don’t know if we’re in the place where we’re ready to take anyone on tour. I think for us, it’s much more like we’d love to tour with larger acts. I mean, gosh, it would be cool to go on tour with IDLES. Alicia, I’m sure you have some ideas. [laughs]

Alicia: We’ve played shows with Viagra Boys. They were really fun and I feel like we fit really well together. Amyl and the Sniffers last night was really great to play with, I would love to play with them again. Dry Cleaning is another cool one. The thing that we’ve found consistently to be interesting about us is that our history of who we’ve played with is pretty diverse from a genre perspective. We’ve played with Viagra Boys and Modern English. So I really don’t know. Obviously, for the past couple of years not being able to tour all I want to do is go support a large band on tour but I can’t quite identify or predict who that’s going to be because we play really well with bands from the 80s and 90s but also new bands, it’s all over the place. I’m excited to see who we’ll wind up with but it’s a large group of bands that I think we would do well with.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask that you’d like to add?

Alicia: I think people are picking up on this but I think it’ll come across more in the new EP that we really like to play with the dynamic of having two singers in the band. I always joke that it’s like Heat Miser and Cold Miser from the old The Year Without A Santa Claus claymation animation movie and it’s fun to play with that. The duality, yin and yang, because even if we’re talking about fake scenarios in our lyrics or things that are real, the way we collaborate and trade lyrics and vocals we get to kind of tease out different attitudes against two voices. I don’t think that we’ve locked in with how much of a toy that is for us to play with until recently. It’s a very fun dynamic, having two sides of a coin to keep flashing between.