Q&A: Ganser’s New Album ‘Animal Hospital’ Lives Between Chaos and Control
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
IN CHICAGO, SIGNS FOR “ANIMAL HOSPITALS” ARE EVERYWHERE — a common phrase locally, but one that rarely appears on the West Coast, where “veterinary clinic” or “vet’s office” is the standard. Removed from its everyday meaning, the term “animal hospital” takes on a striking duality. It fuses two extremes: raw, base instincts and one of the most sterile, controlled environments imaginable. It becomes a metaphor—a place where the wild and the orderly are forced to coexist.
That same duality pulses through Animal Hospital, the third album from Chicago’s genre-defiant trio Ganser. Out August 29, the album is a meditation on contradiction, tension, and the ever-present friction between instinct and performance. With the return of producer Angus Andrew (Liars), Ganser deepens its commitment to exploring emotional and sonic extremes—delivering a body of work that is both volatile and intentionally crafted.
Throughout the record, moments of chaos crash against carefully constructed order. Emotions are frayed and contained in equal measure. Animal Hospital doesn’t just describe a space—it embodies it, offering a soundscape where control constantly threatens to slip, and instinct rises through the cracks.
Composed of Alicia Gaines (bass/vocals), Sophie Sputnik (vocals/keys) and Brian Cundiff (drums), the trio's music teeters on the edge of no wave urgency, art rock dissonance, and post-punk intensity, always crackling with tension, always evolving.
Animal Hospital is a sonic pressure chamber, exploring the dualities that govern our lives: animal instinct and societal pretense, chaos and structure, truth and performance. It’s a record born of contradictions, not resolved but gloriously embraced, and it resonates with a sharpened instinct forged in the fire of the band’s past releases.
To mark the album announcement, Ganser shared its gripping opening track, “Black Sand,” along with a video directed by Gaines.
“The album is about that space between what we are and what we pretend to be,” Gaines says. “You’ve got instincts: raw, animal things—and then all these systems we build, all these dreams of being civilized or advanced or whatever. But those two things don’t always line up. And time doesn’t care. Time just keeps going. It pulls everything apart, slow and quiet like water in the walls. And we’re all just in there, making noise, trying to figure out which side of the glass we’re on.”
Ganser has always made music for people who feel out of step with the world, and Animal Hospital serves as both a salve and a provocation. It’s a work of raw expression, where the album’s catharsis and defiance reflects the fragility of the structures we build around ourselves. On this record, Ganser offers recognition, reflection, and a reminder that contradiction is not failure. It’s the most human thing of all.
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
ALICIA: For us, it's always something that's been a multimedia project, but in terms of the music itself, the way that I think about it is that we have a lot of different sounds within us. So whether it's something that's more abrasive or something that's more meditative, I think there's a lot of syncopation in our work. There's a lot of rumination in our work. With this new record, the thing that's new is our music was always very inwardly focused and looking at the self and looking at your own thought processes and working that out through music. I think especially going through the past couple of years that everybody has, we've started to look more outward. This record looks out onto the world. It's observant.
LUNA: Your newest single release “Black Sand” opens up your third record. Why did you choose this track to introduce Animal Hospital to the world?
ALICIA: It’s introducing the record but also introducing Sophie who's new to the project. Brian had written the original demo, and Sophie took that demo and then just totally turned it upside down. We work a lot in Ableton and Pro Tools. She took his demo, modified it a ton, and then added vocals and lyrics. It seems like the best of all worlds to have something that has passed through multiple hands within the band, which is pretty common for us. What was nice for me is that I just got to direct the music video for this one and play bass guitar on it. I just got to observe their work and interpret their work in a different medium.
LUNA: The visual world of Ganser has always been evocative and driven by storytelling, and Alicia, you directed the video for “Black Sand.” What story or mood were you aiming to create visually in relation to the song’s intensity?
ALICIA: The whole lens of looking out onto a world and being able to observe the world, as we've been going through what we've all been going through the past couple of years. I think it's rare that in life, you get to see everyone go through the same stimuli, and you get to see everyone's response to the same thing happening. That was something really unique through 2020 was seeing everyone and everyone that you don't know going through the same thing. Metaphorically, we all had binoculars and we're looking and seeing how everybody was reacting to the same thing at the same time. Everything has been moving so fast, it feels like time is speeding up for everyone. I think that's something captured in the video, that sense that every single time you look outside, it's different. That was something that really resonated with us. The idea was developed over months.
LUNA: Ganser is about to release its third album Animal Hospital later this summer and huge congratulations! I love how it pushes new sonic boundaries while also staying really rooted in your foundation. What are some central themes or inspirations that you wanted to explore while bringing Animal Hospital to fruition?
ALICIA: When I moved to Chicago from the West Coast, I noticed these signs for animal hospitals in Chicago, and that's really regional terminology. It's something that doesn't exist as far as I know on the West Coast. It's a veterinarian's office or a clinic. I don't know how regional it is, but I really like the duality of those two words. If you take them outside of the context of being an animal hospital, it really is, to me, putting together two extremes and your base desires and those animal instincts, along with maybe one of the most controlled environments humanity has ever made.
When you have the side that's wild and you have the side that's very controlled, I think that speaks a lot to what folks are going to hear on the record in terms of ping ponging between those two extremes. The thing that I love about it too, is that one side is that they both have their flaws. They both have their strengths. Each song is a reaction to the previous song. We're especially excited for folks to listen to the record when it comes out from front to back.
LUNA: You returned to working with Angus Andrew for Animal Hospital. What was the creative process like this time around? How did his presence shape or push the direction of the record?
ALICIA: We've admired Liars for a very long time, and Angus is just amazing to work with, because Liars’ sound has encapsulated so many different kinds of sounds over the decades now that it's been a project. For us, with those extremes in our record, we wanted someone who'd be able to give us advice on a really slow song and also something that's very straight bass, guitar, vocals, drums, rock song. Having Angus in the studio was something that was really important to us. He worked with us before we even went into the studio to help us narrow down the songs. You can imagine, with this being our first record in five years, we had a lot of demos.
Angus was even a part of that process of selecting which songs were even going to go on the record. So from the start, that's how he jumped in. And then from there, because we had worked together before, we did pre-production together and he came down to Chicago. He's such a great person to have in the studio, because I think especially when it comes to vocals, he has a very unique perspective in terms of what embodies a song. He really pushed both myself and Sophie to get our voices into places that maybe weren't our first thought. We really had to go and refine and approach things in different ways, but I think especially now using multiple vocal layers and vocal effects in our live show, he passed down some of the learning that he had when he was putting together Liars.
LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on the album — one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing of who Ganser is right now?
ALICIA: I keep coming back to the song “Discount Diamonds,” that's on the second part of the record. It'll be the second single released. I feel like it's us working on all cylinders in terms of taking all the learning that we have as musicians. Brian and I, working very closely together as songwriters, and really taking a song that feels fully realized in a way that feels like a new era for us and the next step and what we are able to put together.
LUNA: Compared to Just Look at That Sky, this new record feels more unpredictable. What creative risks did you intentionally explore this time around that marked a departure from the last album?
ALICIA: At its core, a classic song for us is something that feels a little bit like double dutch. I always picture the kids from the peanuts Christmas special, where each kid is doing their own dance, but for some reason it all goes together. A classic song for us has drums doing one thing, bass doing another thing, usually at odds with what the guitar is doing. But for some reason it's holding together in that double dutch way. While that is our bread and butter, we definitely wanted to expand past that. I think you're going to find some of the same games we play with ourselves sonically, but in different forms and mutations and maybe a couple of extra layers and sophistication on top.
LUNA: Did you experience any personal or creative breakthroughs or lessons while working on Animal Hospital that have shifted how you view yourself or your artistry?
ALICIA: I think every band’s first record is ripping the band aid off. We recorded that one in five days and mixed it in five days. We've recorded mostly together by this point. I think what I learned, especially making the record over such a long period of time, is that I have five years of notes and five years of visual reference and ideas for music videos. Hopefully, folks sense an energy behind that, because some of these ideas are ideas that existed during a time when no one was really able to do anything. I think at this point, what we're looking at is a band that's able to finally make those ideas come to life. Back then, we were all wondering whether the world was going to end, so there's not an optimism, but I think it's the closest we're going to get to that feeling, just because we feel lucky to do it at all.
LUNA: What are you most excited for listeners to experience when they hear Animal Hospital in its entirety?
ALICIA: The thing that I'm excited to have people hear is really the journey between the tracks. I think that's something that was something that took the longest for us to figure out. It was the thing that we had to work with Angus on pretty closely as to how we were going to sequence the record. I think there are moments on this record between Side A and Side B, those little moments, those transitional moments, I think those places are going to be some fun places to catch some Easter eggs and small details.
LUNA: How are you planning on celebrating the album release?
ALICIA: We're working on those plans right now, so they're a little under wraps, but we're hoping to do some touring this fall and letting everybody know about that pretty soon.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?
ALICIA: Everyone is playing their own game. So for us, I think we feel successful when we're able to pull off, let's say visuals that go along with the song perfectly. We're not necessarily comparing ourselves to what anybody else is doing. If we're able to get it on the road and show the music to the people in real life, because that's half the fun, then also put together these little snow globes of music videos. That's what means the world, to me, at least, is doing that and creating those pieces, but also going out and experiencing with other people. I think it's the duality of both those things that's really where satisfaction was for me.
