THIS IS VERY SERIOUS. THIS IS NOT A JOKE.

This is an album about murdering your boss and stealing their pile of skulls. If you could boil Bad Floods down into one sentence, Shāna explained, it would be this. In some ways, the message is hard to miss. Shāna brings it to the fore, as they did one night in a purple-lit basement in Bushwick in November, when they presided over a synth, a laptop, a guitar, a wild mess of wires, and said, “We’ve been working on this stuff for a really long time,” right before they launched into the first song, “and it’s all about a bunch of centrists who we should probably kill very soon.”

In other ways, the message fades into the background, just another instrument to blend with the sonorous synths, coldwave loops that propel these densely layered songs forward in an urgent and dark, art-punk landscape underneath Shāna’s melodic screaming. The lyrics are sometimes hard to decipher because the lyrics are driven by their sound—as Shāna says, “the lyrics were written without from the perspective of not knowing what they were about,” almost as though they were an anthropologist uncovering their own concept. But “I think they do feel urgent. And I think a lot of it feels urgent because I'm constantly plugging away at stuff as I document and discover and think about subject matter.” The words arrive in the field as a flash of Shāna’s own urgency — pain — power — alone. But just as the song builds to a crescendo, just as you’re cresting your own understanding, the groove starts to break down, a reminder of how easy it is to slip in and out of the pocket until things fall apart.

The germ of this project began for Shāna like each song on the album — with a modular synth.“I was kind of burned out on music,” Shāna said. At the time, they were working six to ten jobs, depending on the week—teaching, working sound, mixing on the side—“resourceless,” as they said, and doing whatever they had to to make rent. Shāna approached their instrument like an archivist, making a library of modular experiments that they catalogued, numbering them 1 into the several hundreds. These fractional compositions with narrow concerns and massive emotional resonance—à la Pauline Oliveros and the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer — gave them another way in. “It gave me an opportunity to disconnect and disassociate from what I understood music as,” they said, “I was really into synthesis.”

The more they worked on their “modular stuff,” the more the scope grew. Shāna started spending time in a studio in Greenpoint, and furtively recording in between shifts—laying down enough isolated drums for a lifetime—often in the middle of the night (“We had a bed there,” they said.) They started working on visuals; they got their friends together and started rehearsing the live show; they booked a tour—the only hitch: Their first show was scheduled for March 20, 2020.

“What I'm watching,” they said, “that's scaring the fuck out of me. And so I was like, OK, nobody's going to do anything for a while. I should just make a record because I am just going to die after this.” The pandemic radicalized Shāna. “I think it happened within weeks,” they said, because “It was the first time that I had not had to work ever, I think since I was 15. It was really just like I hadn't taken a vacation in my adult life.” Shāna was, like so many us, alone. “Eight months,” they said. “I don't think I really spent any significant time with anybody for at least that amount of time.”

“It was the first time I had a couple of weeks where I just sat and I didn't have to do anything,” they said. “And I just was reading stuff, trying to grasp at an understanding of the world around me because I was by myself and I didn't know what to do. And the world was scary.” It wasn’t even radical leftist media that turned them—it was just listening to liberals try to explain why the world was falling apart.

“If you want to know how I got radicalized, fucking Jake Tapper radicalized me,” they said. “I paid for cable. I bought it because in my brain I was like, ‘I'm alone, I'll get everything. I'll have all the information and then there'll be noise in the background.’ I watched TV news for more time than I'd ever watched TV news before. And then I listened casually to some leftist podcast on YouTube for five minutes—and it was like, oh, that makes sense.”

This was its own period of synthesis. Shāna’s solitude produced another urgent turn to writing, and everything they were absorbing found its way into their art. “This album, it turned out as I was writing, was about all of the worst people that I was encountering,” they said. “I did it in the process of trying to document, and going through lockdown gave me the time and space to form an analysis and an understanding. And I started to recognize the villains that I was cataloging. I started to have faces and names and an understanding of who these people are, specifically what these systems are, what these structures are. Because it’s not people, it's fucking structures. Elon Musk fucking sucks. Great. But it's a structure.”

Each song tenses with these associations. The people are part of the scaffold that ebbs and flows like the pitch. Sometimes we feel rooted squarely in Shāna’s perspective‚ other times we step into the lives of those who have more money than us, more power than us, more smooth-brained than us. Shāna’s first track off the album “I Die Again” starts with a fugitive chord supporting their voice: “Some days are better when they’re broken into codes and bribes,” they sing, “I try to map this pain to feel the limits of my power.” Who are we, here? Are we Shāna, clinging to sanity during their lockdown? Are we another run-of-the-mill lurker on moot’s imageboard? Or is there a hint, in “codes and bribes,” that there’s something more sinister at play? “You can’t die from being alone,” Shāna sings as the drums come in.

“It’s written from a dual perspective,” Shāna wrote in a note. “Interpretable as a russiagate obsessed boomer or as epstein themselves, but also just from the general perspective of hopelessness we all feel in the current system” Later, they added: “THIS IS ABOUT FOURCHAN GUYS” Shāna’s voice floats above it all, “It’s like / I’m / Tuned in,” they wail while the synth oscillates and hiccups as though the gap between these figures and their various perspectives is breaking down, or the WiFi is losing its signal.

Bad Floods is out April 4 (via Off Tempo), and Shāna has plans for a live tour in 2025. “I like people,” they said of performing. “I'm lucky. I'm not a sociopath. And that's really lucky. I'm also real spectrum. There's a lot of sociopaths out there on the spectrum. But I love people. I like looking at large crowds of people and reading them. It just makes sense to me. It's like, ‘Oh, am I doing something that's making this crowd happy or sad? How are they responding to me? And also why?’” That's part of figuring out how to be considerate, how to make a practice have any consideration whatsoever, and not just be devoid of the humanity of connection that drives it.”

That is, ultimately, what’s so moving about this record. As a listener, you’re invited into the experience at every level—there’s a secret here but you’re in on it: it’s a secret of what’s hidden right on the surface. As I was about to leave, Shāna grabbed a blank piece of paper and scrawled a note in thick black Sharpie: THIS IS VERY SERIOUS. THIS IS NOT A JOKE. I nodded. It immediately made sense to me.

“This is important,” they said. “Do you know what I mean?”