Imaad Wasif does not make ambient lifestyle music. He builds portals. ‘We Are Hunters,’ from Superconsciousness out on Voidist Records, marks a threshold moment. The psychic architecture he has shaped for three decades expands here, denser and more deliberate.
Born in Vancouver and raised in California’s low desert, Wasif has drifted across scenes without settling into one. As frontman of lowercase, he anchored himself in the 90s slow core and noise underground. With alaska! and Grim Tower, he pulled folk music toward darker, more ceremonial terrain. His collaborations with Lou Barlow in The Folk Implosion tied him to indie rock’s lo fi canon, while his work alongside Karen O on Where the Wild Things Are embedded his sensibility into early 2000s art rock maximalism.
Written while touring with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Superconsciousness folds early electronic textures into his long standing goth folk and psychedelic leanings. Wasif approaches songwriting as descent, a shedding of identity in search of something essential. In that cosmology, hunters move through shadow toward what hides beneath memory, faith, or fracture.
Across decades, a private spiritual logic has remained constant. Wasif treats music as transformation rather than diversion. His records trace collapse and return, more passage than collection.
Superconsciousness feels like the most integrated version of that philosophy. Layered guitars and synthesisers deepen his primitive psych folk core rather than smoothing it out. In a streaming landscape that rewards mood over meaning, that structure stands out.
Wasif has long operated as a musician’s musician, his fingerprints visible across desert psych and New York art rock without dominating the headline. This release may shift that balance. For listeners discovering him through vinyl culture or algorithmic drift, it serves as both entry point and distillation.
If it connects, expansion feels inevitable. Wasif has built a slow, interconnected mythology, and here it coheres as the sound grows fuller and the frame widens. ‘We Are Hunters’ is not about conquest but attention, the act of tracking what haunts you until it reveals its shape. In his universe, the pursuit is the point.