Ecce Shnak Talk New Album Dandy Variances, Out 2026 on Records, Man Records

Transmission 411: Interview with Ecce Shnak

There is a particular kind of New York band that seems to have absorbed the city’s contradictions directly into its bloodstream, and Ecce Shnak, formed in the mid-1990s out of the city’s experimental scene, wear theirs proudly. David Roush, the group’s composer, bassist and baritone vocalist, nearly became a psychotherapist before deciding the inefficiencies of the American mental healthcare system were better channelled into songwriting than absorbed into burnout, an instinct that runs straight through the band’s forthcoming album Dandy Variances.

Title: Dandy Variances
Artist: Ecce Shnak
Genres: Alternative Rock, Art Rock, Indie Rock
Label: Records Man Records
Description: Ecce Shnak's David Roush talks psychotherapy, politics and grief ahead of Dandy Variances, out 2026 on Records, Man Records.

Alongside Roush sit Bella Komodromos on vocals, guitarists Chris Krasnow and Gannon Ferrell. Together they have built what can only be described as a volatile, meticulously engineered ecosystem, technical precision colliding head first with inspired mayhem, and the results land somewhere between garage rock’s scrappy honesty and something considerably weirder and more ambitious.

Dandy Variances moves from lighthearted party music into songs of grief and political anger, taking in war, police violence and an homage to the murdered Brazilian activist Marielle Franco, before settling into something closer to prayer by its close. It is, by any reasonable account, an album that refuses to sit still, and if early singles like Eddie, Legalistic Homeslice are any indication, Ecce Shnak have found a way to make that restlessness sound less like chaos and more like the truest kind of coherence.

Featured image: © Tommy Krause

And what were you listening to before you started making music? What made you decide to pursue it as a career?

I guess I would say, I think most of what I heard as a young person was a mix of some of the music my parents enjoyed and some things that stuck out to me on the radio. The main names that come to mind, my dad is a pretty big Beatles guy. My mom, I think I heard most from her, sacred Christian music, and actually Little Richard.

Those are the first things that come to mind in terms of the very first music I heard as a young person, and then the radio stations that I gravitated towards were alternative rock kinds of things. I didn’t really get into more music off the beaten path until I was a little older. It was just a lot of things that might sound a little corny to us now, but it’s still important to me, in terms of honoring the music that you first hear when you’re a little person and you don’t have a lot of those judgments or biases yet.

I originally thought I was going to be a psychotherapist, and I had about 18 months of work as an intake worker, which was basically the first person that somebody sees at the behavioral health care center that I worked at, which was basically like a psychotherapeutic clinic. It was in Philadelphia, and I still care very much about psychology and to some extent psychotherapy.

But I was quite overwhelmed by the inefficiencies in the systems we have in America to help people who need help. There are all of these flaming hoops, these difficult interferences with the caretaker and the patient that make it really hard for the caretaker and the patient to have a relationship that could provide healing to the patient. So I got kind of burnt out by that.

Meanwhile, I was writing music all the time, playing classical guitar, which is what I was studying mostly. This was my early 20s, like 22, 23. I was playing music in that vein all the time.

Then I said to myself, damn, if I become 50 years old, and I have spent my life trying to do this work where there’s a lot of painful interference. What if I get really upset with a patient someday and start putting all of that frustration and disappointment on them, which they don’t deserve, because I didn’t follow my heart when I could have. That thought combined with the feeling of just wanting to make music all the time, something in me just said, I need to devote myself in a direct way to music, and in a professional way too.

How did you all find each other?

Well, this version of the band has been together, I think, for four years. I met the drummer, though, a long time before I met the other members, a little more than, probably 10 years ago, or nine years ago, something like that. I found him over Craigslist, through a guitarist that was in the band for a little while.

He gave me the referral of the drummer now, his name is Henry Vaughn, and he’s been the member of the band that’s been in it for the longest, aside from myself. The other singer I met because a previous version of the band was playing a concert in a suburb of Boston at a house show, and Bella, the other singer now, was a member of the audience. It was a Halloween party, so everybody was in these funny costumes.

She had a really funny costume, and we started talking and had a cool conversation. I later learned that she herself is a really good singer and composer of really excellent music, and I had her name for several years. When I needed new singers, I’m going to guess, in 2022, I reached out to her and said, hey, do you want to audition?

She said sure. We had the audition in Prospect Park, which is a beautiful park here, not 15 minutes from me in Brooklyn. The audition was like she was already in the band.

I forgot we were even auditioning. She just sang so beautifully herself and then worked with my voice in a way that I forgot that she wasn’t in the band. I basically offered her the position right after we stopped singing that day.

The other two guitarists, Chris Krasnow and Gannon Ferrell, I met through a previous bassist of the band. They’ve been fantastic players in the group, just as guitarists, in the simplest technical sense, but also they’re incredible sound designers. They both have pretty elaborate guitar pedal boards, and they can create pretty much any sound anybody can want from their pedal boards sonically.

Their skills as guitarists are really, really, really high level. So this version of the group has been together for about four years, and we met in that way.

Looking back at the band’s earliest material versus now, what’s the biggest shift in how you approach songwriting?

Well, I think I tend to have a pretty consistent method for songwriting, which is that music occurs to us in many different ways. You can hear somebody say a funny phrase, an interesting phrase that is funny or sad or interesting in some other way, and you say, holy heck, that phrase sounds musical. Anything we say aloud has its own rhythm, and it also has its maybe suggested melody.

A phrase that you hear somebody say, if you listen closely to it and you repeat it to yourself, it can start to have a flow and a rhythm that can turn into a lyric and even a melody. Sometimes melodies come from that sort of experience, but then other times you hear a drum beat that you love from another drummer or you imagine one yourself, and that can start the process. Or you’re noodling on an instrument and you like some melody or chord progression, and then what I always do is just try to develop as much of that one aspect, whether it’s a lyric or a drum beat or a melody, chord progression, whatever it is, develop it as much as I can.

But when I start to get bored, I say, okay, enough of that. What does this suggest about the other elements of the music? What chords are implied by this melody or these lyrics?

What lyrics are implied by this drum beat? Or does this drum beat sound like a noisy rock song or does it sound like something gentle? What does the drum beat suggest about the other elements of the music?

Or if I come up with a chord progression that I love, I let that suggest the other things. It’s really about letting the different aspects of the music suggest other aspects and then trying to find a meaningful whole from synthesizing all of those aspects.

Does the album have a narrative arc or is each song its own self-contained world?

Great question. And interestingly enough, the funny image you see behind me is the artwork on the main cover. There’s an artist in California named Karen Barber who did this beautiful painting.

There’s kind of what looks like a female figure, some kind of goddess or surreal female figure. Maybe to the side, she’s got some shadow or other version of herself floating. Then in the other parts of the picture that you can’t see, there are these what look like surreal trees or flowers.

I think I love this art for the album because it does kind of suggest the story of the album, or maybe the main themes of it. When we think about what the themes of the album are, these days when people ask me, hey, how are you doing? I usually say I’m a mix.

I’m a mix of good things, bad things and mediocre things. Life is a mix. There are joyful things, heartbreaks, things that piss us off.

Then there’s plenty of boredoms too in life. So I guess there is a kind of arc, which is a journey through all of those different, the mix of life, the good things, the bad things, the mediocre things. The things that feel divine, the things that feel like they are from earth and from mortal beings.

So the Dandy Variances are all of the kinds of changes, all of the parts of the weird mix. The album begins in a kind of lighthearted, playful way, at least lyrically. Then it gets more serious.

There are some serious political themes. And with that, some anger at what I feel are some serious injustices in the world. Some concern, some fear, some anxiety.

Then the album ends in a more personal, meditative, reflective way, almost a prayerful way. So I think the mix goes from lighthearted party music to serious music about human suffering and injustice and that sort of thing, to almost religious meditation on all this stuff.

Hopefully it still feels like one story, like one mix.

What art, literature or political ideas have been feeding into your songwriting for this album?

Well, in that section of the record, I would say there’s an ardent leftist perspective. There’s a challenge of war. There’s a song called Prayer on War, which is just that.

It’s a song of grief that we still do this horrible thing called war. I don’t use the word, but a version of war is genocide. The genocides going on throughout the world are heartbreaking and cause a lot of moral anger in most feeling people.

So there’s an anti-war perspective. There is a challenge of police violence and surveillance and incarceration, which some people would say is just the war powers that are usually fighting abroad just turned on their own people. There is an homage to a very brave figure in Brazil, a woman named Marielle Franco, who was a working class woman born in the favelas.

I think she was born there. She definitely lived there in Rio de Janeiro. She had a very outspoken advocacy for poor and working people in her community, for indigenous people, for black people.

She was also gay, so she had a very passionate moral mission to realize a more just world in all of those spheres of the world. But she was assassinated in, I think, 2018. So the song is an homage to her.

I think that summarizes most of the political themes on the album.

Are there any guest musicians or collaborators on the album beyond the core five?

My dear friend Jonathan Green is a fantastic clarinet player. The end of the album has two songs that worked really well with the clarinet. So the engineer and producer of the album, my other dear friend Jeff and I, invited him to play clarinet on those two songs.

He’s also on one other song, but his instrument sounds a little bit more like a weird guitar. We put some funny effects on it, or like a Rhodes organ or something like that. So I think that’s the main featured musician, Jonathan Green.

With Dandy Variances still ahead, where do you see the band going next?

So we hope to tour the heck out of this album this fall. We’re in the process of hopefully getting some dates with some bands we really love. Our manager and booking agent are working on that now.

We will post those arrangements when we have them. We’re really looking to tour this album very extensively. Also at the end of January 2027, there’s a high likelihood that we will be in the United Kingdom during Indie Week, which from what I understand, I’ve never been to it.

Our manager told me that I think it’s the last week of January. All throughout that region, there’s a lot of music going on. We hope to perform there.

We’ve had three wonderful tours with the British band EMF. They have that song, you know, unbelievable, if you remember that one, and a bunch of other really kick ass songs. We’ve had an incredible time with them on those three tours.

So there’s a decent likelihood that we’ll play again with them if we do go for Indie Week next January.

Photos and images courtesy of Ecce Shnak

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others