Quannnic’s Warbrained Cuts Through the Cloud Rock Fog

Nick Quan has always sounded like someone trying to wrench transcendence out of a malfunctioning hard drive, but on “Heavensafe,” he goes ahead and names the condition outright: “I’ve turned to slop again.” It’s a line that lands like a thesis statement for the state of shoegaze circa last summer, when the genre’s newest and strangest branch—“cloud rock,” a term still said with a shrug—seemed intent on reversing the hierarchy of its forebears. Instead of smothering emotion beneath avalanches of pedalboard noise, this stuff privileged numbness first, volume second, if at all. Quan, a digital-rock prodigy who’s toured with Slowdive, countered the haziness with a bewildering precision, playing like a sleep-deprived virtuoso trying to debug his own brain.

When his featherweight single “life imitates life” went TikTok mega-viral in 2023, Quan zagged. Instead of doubling down on simplicity, he delivered Stepdream, a labyrinthine debut that required new digits to count the chords and probably new digits to play them. It wasn’t shoegaze so much as a shoegaze facsimile still learning its own language—scuzzy, soft, overclocked, undercooked, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes grating. In other words, exactly where the genre at large has found itself in the 2020s: compelled by nostalgia but unclear on what kind of future it’s building.

Now performing as quannnic, Quan has aged out of wunderkind status and into something like cloud rock’s unofficial patron saint—a digicore elder whose earliest Bandcamp lore already circulates like scripture. His first two projects sketched out opposite poles: Kenopsia blurred the edges; Stepdream melted them. But Warbrained, his latest, is startlingly straightforward in its ambitions: a loving, deeply studied reconstruction of ’90s alterna-rock tropes done with such fluency that it bypasses derivation and lands somewhere more uncanny. Quannnic plays the role of weathered lifer here, side-eyeing the ongoing race to Make Shoegaze Slop Again. Who can channel My Bloody Valentine in the most Dean Blunt way? Who can make yearning sound the most detached? Warbrained is a refusal of the arms race—an insistence that the basics, when played with conviction, can feel revolutionary. And of course, nothing about shoegaze’s “basics” is basic; it takes a warehouse’s worth of gear to sound this alone in the universe.

Warbrained’s magic is in the details. Quannnic’s restless, ever-morphing arrangements find a sweet spot between orchestral density and bedroom-pop fragility. Songs behave like organisms deciding which species they’ll evolve into. “Wrenches” lets its guitars rot and glow simultaneously, each wisp of feedback widening the emotional aperture. “Observer” pairs dehydrated sun-dazed chords with laser-precise licks that wobble like they’re drunk, or simply exhausted. Bedroom rock has always been about one person masquerading as an entire band—the stacking, panning, doubling, smearing. Digi-rock often obscures that mess behind software slickness. But on the chest-beating “Floorface,” everything feels jubilantly corporeal: every downstroke hits like a collision, every layer lands like a body slamming into another. It’s as if Quan—a notorious digital tinkerer—remembered that sometimes the most radical gesture is picking up an actual guitar and hitting it too hard.

Still, Warbrained never reverts to binary thinking. It’s not “analog good, digital bad”; it’s the friction between the two that sparks fire. Quannnic uses synths as destabilizers, not substitutes—sub-bass hugging bass guitar instead of replacing it, keys refusing to obediently shadow chord progressions. On “Wardeath,” icy pads keep slipping out of alignment, imbuing the track with a human unease. “Prunesnail,” meanwhile, bursts with toy-box color, its synth spritzes mimicking a guitar falling over mid-recording. Lots of artists talk about “polyphonic perception.” Warbrained actually delivers it, making multiplicity feel intuitive, even generous.

“Prunesnail” is the album’s most surprising revelation: a glimmering, hopeful thing, almost cherubic compared to quannnic’s typically bleary world. Within the deadAir label constellation—where Photographic Memory dissolves rock into remix culture and Jane Remover burns it down entirely—quannnic stakes the middle ground: digicore-blooded, soft-gazed, absolutely shredding. Cloud rock, a sonic cousin to hyperpop, is currently learning how to exist outside the bedroom, in a world that demands bodies and breath. Warbrained answers that call. Its tenderness is physical; its noise is physical; its hope is physical. This is music learning to re-enter the world with shaky legs. Warbrained’s body is bruised, trembling, half-built—but undeniably alive.

For a scene addicted to dissociation, that’s a tiny act of rebellion. For shoegaze, it’s a lungful of air.