Hitting the Road with Yeah Yeah Yeahs as Second Guitarist and Opening Dates (below!)
Track marks the first new music released through Wasif’s
Voidist Records
Note from Imaad Wasif:
‘I See a Darkness’ came like a bolt from the blue when I was 23 years old, piercing through to the light beyond my young myopia. I was writing a strange kind of song in my first band lowercase but I didn’t yet know how to put this kind of a voice to the darkness I felt inside, I only really knew how to scream about it. We had played with Will Oldham in his Palace configuration a few years earlier at the Troubadour in LA and I had seen him play a lot since then. He was one of those untouchable songwriters who at the time I put on a dais. But he was also a true weirdo from the Louisville scene at a time when Slint’s ‘Spiderland’ was on my record player on heavy rotation.
When lowercase was on the road we would listen to Will’s music, devouring the tapes. When the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy record came out, its stark sound and artwork aligned with everything that we were doing. We played that album start to finish and back again for months. I became obsessed with it. It inspired me to buy a decent acoustic guitar and see if I could figure out how to write such a direct, unadorned and wholly transcendent message. While I can say that at this point in my life I’ve succeeded at that in my own way, ‘I See a Darkness’ was a gateway that opened on to the path to get there.
Songs like this don’t come around but once in a lifetime. I started covering it live in 2024 when I was going through some huge life changes and then after the Eaton fires in Altadena had displaced me from my home, it resonated even louder. So in February 2025, I recorded this version at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, while I was there working with Yeah Yeah Yeahs amidst the bright stars and the wintered bare pecan trees. I did two takes and this was the first. My friend Bobb Bruno just happened to be there working in Studio B with the band Nothing so I asked him to come over and put some bass down. Brian Chase was decompressing from a few days of intense sessions, but I asked him if he would add some drums, having never heard the song before. It all happened very organically, everyone’s late night wooziness supersaturating the recording.
I don’t know who the lyrics were originally written for but I do know that the first time I heard it I felt that they were written directly to me, which, after years of deep diving into the Akashic songbook I’ve come to realize is the universal shared truth behind every great song.
A song like this achieves a cosmic leveling. It speaks to everyone, even within its polarizing language. It twists into your psyche with its tentacles and it flips the whole scene. It makes you witness within yourself the eternal pull between sadness and joy and it takes you somewhere outside of reality to a place you want to stay, or a place that you can always return to. It turns you into its narrator.
The accompanying video captures a lone figure on a long drive to escape an emotion. It looks like me but it’s not me. It was filmed in one shot, much like the music was recorded, distilling everything into a moment of time, an otherworldly scene from a French film blurred. It was directed by Astara Calas who took inspiration from Wim Wenders’ ‘Wings of Desire’ wherein the viewer is a voyeuristic spirit witnessing the character’s most intimate thoughts.
ABOUT IMAAD WASIF
Imaad Wasif is a singer-songwriter, guitarist, and composer known for his emotionally charged songs and genre-defying sound. With a career spanning collaborations with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Lou Barlow, and fronting L.A. underground slowcore legends lowercase, he continues to push the boundaries of rock, folk, and experimental music. Blending elements of minimalism, goth folk, Indian ragas and post-punk with psychedelic and sometimes blistering guitar playing, Wasif has created a wide body of work that includes numerous projects (psych folk mavericks alaska!, sci-fi conceptualists ACID), also writing song with Karen O for the soundtrack of Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” He has released six critically acclaimed solo albums to date.
Wasif is pleased to announce his new label, ‘Voidist Records,’ which will oversee the re-distribution of his entire back catalog and will be the home of all of his future albums. To celebrate, Wasif is releasing a cover of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “I See a Darkness,” a song that has long inspired him.
Catch Imaad Wasif on stage with Yeah Yeah Yeahs this summer:
JUNE 16 – O2 APOLLO – Manchester, United Kingdom
JUNE 18 & 19 – ROYAL ALBERT HALL – London, United Kingdom
JUNE 26 – SAN DIEGO COUNTY FAIR – Del Mar, California
JUNE 30, JULY 1 & 2 – TEATRO METROPOLITAN – Mexico City, Mexico
JULY 09, 10, 11 – ORPHEUM THEATRE – Los Angeles, California
JULY 14 & 15 – DAVIES SYMPHONY HALL – San Francisco, California
JULY 18 & 19 – RYMAN AUDITORIUM – Nashville, Tennessee
JULY 22 & 23 – THE CHICAGO THEATRE – Chicago, Illinois
JULY 28, 29 & 30 – BEACON THEATRE – New York City, NYC
…and also as opening act July 11 Orpheum and July 18 Ryman!!
We last covered Imaad Wasif back in 2010.
