How the 2025 Altadena wildfires, a Yeah Yeah Yeahs tour, and 34 discarded songs shaped one record
Transmission 330: Interview with Imaad Wasif
Featured image: © Robin Laananen
Genres: Alternative Rock, Gothic Rock, Indie Rock, Post-punk
Label: Voidist Records
Description: Imaad Wasif talks Superconsciousness, out March 18 via Voidist Records — wildfires, Indian ragas, goth-folk, and reclaiming creative control.
Imaad Wasif is a Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and composer based in Los Angeles. His work spans a series of solo records as well as a long stint as the fourth member of Yeah Yeah Yeahs during their Cool It Down album cycle, alongside earlier collaborations with Lou Barlow and a role fronting L.A. slowcore outfit lowercase. Superconsciousness, his seventh album, is out March 18, 2026 on Voidist Records — his own imprint, launched in part to recover control over a back catalogue tied up under pre-streaming label deals.
Recorded between 2022 and 2025 across hotel rooms, home studios, and Bobb Bruno’s studio, the record draws on Indian classical music, post-punk, and what Wasif describes as goth-folk. It features contributions from Heather McIntosh, Nick Zinner, Garrett Ray, and Dylan Fujioka, and was produced by Lewis Pesacov and mixed by Derek Coburn.
Okay, thanks. What were your earliest musical influences before you started making music professionally?
I listened to a lot of East Indian classical music. I grew up in a household — I’m Indian — so a lot of the early instrumental masters from India like Vilayat Khan, Bismillah Khan, Ravi Shankar, a lot of that music was influencing me. I didn’t really come to rock and roll until I was in my teens, and when I finally came into rock and roll, it was like your fairly typical teenage experience with Zeppelin and Hendrix, a lot of the Jimmy Page guitar work. I was realizing he would use these alternate tunings and it sounded to me like the Indian music that I was listening to — I realized that he was tuning his guitar differently to match this music that I grew up listening to, so it was very interesting to me. I quickly moved on into a little more of punk rock and things like the Minutemen, Nirvana was obviously a huge influence on me as a teenager, Joy Division — there were a lot of different influences hitting me. What I realized at the time was it always came down to the song. It didn’t matter — the song spoke to me directly, and the music had to feel raw and potent.
“You can’t change the direction of the waves in the ocean. Sometimes it does feel like I’m drowning in my own desires to change things or set things in a positive direction.”
How do you define superconsciousness in the context of this album?
This record is written from a place of going through a lot of life transition and being very preoccupied with the state of the world and the kind of darkness that I feel has overcome the world and that we are subject to every single day. I was feeling that in all this pain I’m experiencing, this is a pain that everyone is experiencing. There are so many people who have a feeling of helplessness, that they can’t change the way the world is going. This idea of trying to transmute darkness, to change it and to go beyond the state of blind consciousness and become responsible and aware at all times for the way that you exist in this world and what you are actually bringing to the world.
“These systems are inherently set up for artists to fail, to feel lesser than always. You’re being preyed upon because their business model won’t work unless you feel like you need them.”
You call yourself a hardcore nihilist with a heaving heart. How do these two sides coexist?
I’m kind of a shy person, so if I see you on the street, I feel like I’m hiding within myself, hiding within my shadow. Sometimes, to be honest, there’s a futility in what I’m doing — I’m putting so much focused energy into trying to change things through music, and I realized that the format of music is actually, you can’t change the direction of the waves in the ocean. So sometimes it does feel like I’m drowning in my own desires to change things or set things in a positive direction. All I really want out of the music is for people to resonate with it, to connect to it — to realize that there’s a voice for them, to feel solace in a time of pain or introspection or fear. I’m also a very passionate person, so the heaving heart is — I’m always led by my emotion rather than the analytical mind.
How did the 2025 Altadena wildfires physically change the sound of your music, or did they influence the outcome of your album?
It’s a miracle that the album exists. I was working on it prior to those fires and literally, within 24 hours, 9,000 structures in my town were burned and all these families, all these people displaced. I’ve never seen anything like it. I know we’re experiencing non-natural disasters that are far greater than this currently in the world, but for me personally it was like a loss of home. My house didn’t actually burn — it was damaged — but the feeling of home, the feeling of being there, was destroyed for me. It threw me into a sense of a void, a kind of weightlessness. I sought to find grounding through that experience, and it always comes down to the music — the music being touched with this kind of sense of a glimpse of beauty, and then also going into the darkness. I tend to write a lot of my music in minor themes, minor chordings and minor voicings, but I’m obsessed with trying to mix both that and the symphonic world and the melodic world.
Does the record follow a central narrative spine, or do you see it as a collection of standalone chapters?
If anything, it is a journey of a person who is seeking this idea of superconsciousness and the experiences of that. It’s a very personal record — without going into the specifics — but every song is really going into this experience of the search for the heightened sense of awareness beyond the ego.
“Within 24 hours, 9,000 structures in my town were burned — the feeling of home, the feeling of being there, was destroyed for me. It threw me into a sense of a void, a kind of weightlessness.”
You wrote 34 songs for this project. What made these specific 10 survive the cut?
These were the ones that kept coming back into my mind. When I’m writing a lot, sometimes you get into a place where you are over-creating — your first thought, best thought, you’ve already done it in the moment. That’s why I think a lot of people have difficulty getting away from their demos, because it’s like you write a song, you record it immediately, and everything that you want to say is in that — the sonic quality of it, everything about it is the most true and pure version of the song. Then you go into the studio and you try to realize it in a different way and magnify that, and sometimes it doesn’t work. With this record in particular, I tried to be very open to not being attached to the demo and trying the song multiple ways. I was traveling the whole time as well while writing these songs — I was on tour with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, they were touring Cool It Down, and a lot of the times I write on my own while on tour with them. These are the ones that always kept coming back to me in my mind.
What drew you to this specific group of collaborators and what did they bring to the sounds of the album?
These are all new collaborators for me. It came through Heather McIntosh, who played cello on the record — she is amazing and played in the Elephant Six collective, like Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control. Those records were huge for me. I met her because we were doing a Jeff Mangum kind of performance that was a celebration of all that music. She brought these beautiful symphonic lines to songs like Believe and Dark Lord and The Rainbow. Nick Zinner played on Echoing — we’re very close friends, and that was a song I knew I wanted to keep very minimal. I wanted to put it in a David Lynch realm — the feeling of those films, there’s always this kind of lone character in a bar somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and you encounter them singing a song. I wanted that song to feel that way. I’m very honored by all the collaborators on the record — a lot of them are friends of mine.
“The raga is very specific for a time of day and a certain mood — these are very ancient guidelines for existence, and being able to incorporate them into my music has always been a natural thing. I’ve never really thought about it in a conscious way.”
Which musical art form — film, painting or poetry — impacted this album the most?
Honestly, it was a lot of these spiritual texts that I was reading. There’s one in particular, The Seven Laws of Unfoldment, that I was reading through the course of writing a lot of these songs. So probably that.
Why did you decide to launch your own imprint Voidist Records for this release?
I’ve been in the process of getting all my masters for my solo records back from various labels. A lot of those deals were signed before streaming happened, and I didn’t have control over how that music was existing in the world. I felt that we need to move forward into becoming autonomous beings, fully in control of what we put out into the world. The old ways of the record label, artists getting signed and being manipulated in that way — we have to change that. I have huge issues with Spotify and Apple Music — you need them to get your music out into the world, but these systems are inherently set up for artists to fail, to feel lesser than always. You’re being preyed upon because their business model won’t work unless you feel like you need them. So really, I’m just trying to take back control of my life and my work.
As a mirror of the world, what do you see when you look at the world of 2026?
I see an uprising. I see something happening now, I do feel a change happening. I feel that people are tired of the old ways and tired of being fed lies, tired of not being able to control their futures. I get a sense that it’s starting now — people are starting to take back their power and coming up to try to right things in the world.
How has the use of Indian ragas changed your approach to improvisation and song structure?
It’s just integral to what I do. Everything I’ve always done has been in the spirit of that. With the raga, it’s not so much actually improvisational — the raga is very specific for a time of day and a certain mood, and even if you don’t really understand what those are by name, you can feel those things. I felt a lot of those things when I was starting to write my own music, and that idea directed a lot of the way that I wrote. A lot of these droning elements in Indian music are the frequencies that we hear all the time around us — there’s a constant hum of everything, even our breath, our way of existing in the world, we’re vibrating. These are very ancient guidelines for existence, and being able to incorporate them into my music has always been a natural thing. I’ve never really thought about it in a conscious way.
What’s your next project on the horizon after this tour cycle?
Right now I’m trying to work on a cassette-only release for some new songs I’ve been working on. This whole process — you’ve heard the record just now, but I was done with it like six months ago, and there’s a whole delayed process of when you’re finished with a record you’ve already moved beyond it, but then you’re beholden to it because you have to represent it. I’m hoping to get back to Europe to tour — I haven’t been there for solo stuff in probably 13 years, maybe even more. I’ve toured there with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but not on my own. I’m continuing to write — I’m finally feeling inspired to write new songs. I’ve also been chipping away at this idea of a long-form poem that I’ve been working on for probably 12 years, trying to figure out if it has the merit to be released into the world. We don’t necessarily need more and more content in the world, but this is something I keep coming back to.
Photos courtesy of Imaad Wasif
Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others
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