New York City’s art-rock ensemble Ecce Shnak runs on surplus voltage, a band that sounds like five brains arguing happily in real time. At the center is David Roush: composer, bassist, and one of the group’s two vocal presences whose curiosity acts like a ricochet. Around him, Bella Komodromos (vocals), Chris Krasnow and Gannon Ferrell (guitars), and Henry Buchanan-Vaughn (drums) trade sparks. The music feels animated by conversation: quick turns, sudden emphasis, a sense that something sharp might be said at any moment.
Ecce Shnak thrives on friction and velocity. Ideas arrive stacked, sometimes sideways, sometimes laughing at their own audacity. Styles brush shoulders without settling into pastiche; the band hops lanes with a confidence that suggests long nights spent arguing over records, books, footnotes, jokes. Roush’s fascination with the arcane—forgotten thinkers, odd trivia, the social machinery humming beneath daily life—feeds songs that feel both studious and unruly. The intelligence never reads as academic posturing; it’s curious, impatient, eager to poke at the seams.
Their latest EP, Shadows Grow Fangs, distills that approach into five tightly wound pieces, each one paced like a short story with too many ideas to sit still. Tenderness arrives tangled with satire, skepticism, and a raised eyebrow. The EP keeps its balance by trusting structure: the arrangements are deliberate, the pacing exacting, the sense of humor keen. Eccentricity never tips into chaos; everything lands where it needs to.
Prayer on Love opens its arms cautiously, guitars layered with painterly care, each line placed as if testing the weight of the next. The drums cut cleanly, snare hits snapping like commas in a long sentence. Roush’s vocal delivery carries warmth and urgency without theatrical excess, letting the words shoulder their own gravity. It plays like a late-night lecture delivered to a half-empty room that somehow feels full. “Prayer on Love is our most whole-grain rock song to date,” says Roush. “It’s a meditation on the nature of love and its diverse manifestations. It honors the complexity of love without declaring that it ‘is all we need’. The last verse is a celebration of the unique love in each person, all of our flaws notwithstanding.” The song absorbs that philosophy and moves it forward, less sermon than shared inquiry.
The Internet pivots hard into performance art, a skewed chant aimed squarely at algorithms, feeds, and the strange rituals of online life. Funk rhythms bump up against hip-hop cadences and motorik insistence, the band circling the topic like skeptics at a séance. The accompanying visuals ride the information superhighway with a grin, populated by ghosts in the machine. There’s a theatrical bite here, a knowing wink.
The title track, Shadows Grow Fangs, pushes further outward, pulling threads from jazz phrasing, folk simplicity, and electronic abrasion. Dissonant choirs hover, strange instrumental asides dart in and out, voices overlap like internal arguments refusing to resolve. The video leans fully into surrealism, treating the psyche as a crowded room rather than a tidy corridor. It’s restless, playful, and slightly unhinged; music that seems to enjoy thinking aloud.
Jeremy, Utilitarian Sadboy condenses a century of moral philosophy into a sharp 150 seconds. Inspired by Jeremy Bentham, the 19th-century English thinker behind the “greatest happiness principle,” the song barrels through math-metal angles, post-rock lift, and choral surges. Bentham’s legacy looms large: an advocate for liberty, equality, animal rights, prison reform, and the decriminalization of homosexuality, a man who tried to measure happiness itself through his “felicific calculus.”
The EP closes with Stroll With Me, a quiet comedown that feels earned rather than sentimental. A gentle guitar carries a hushed vocal, folky and intimate, like a lullaby hummed after a long argument finally runs out of words. It’s a soft landing that reframes everything that came before, reminding you that beneath the cleverness and velocity, Ecce Shnak understands restraint.
As a whole, Shadows Grow Fangs trusts curiosity, rewards attention, and treats ideas as toys meant to be handled roughly.
Listen to Shadows Grow Fangs below and order the album here.
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