Canadian psych-folk artist Imaad Wasif has been a staple of the alt-rock scene for two decades now as a solo songwriter, the leader of post-hardcore icons lowercase, and a collaborator to everyone from Karen O to Lou Barlow. With such a vast and diverse catalog to his name, Wasif is now launching his own label Voidist Records to redistribute all of his old records, as well as to release all future music through. And to celebrate the news, his first new material arrives today with a title that seemingly pays homage to the name he chose for his label.
Well, “new” might be a little misleading—“I See a Darkness” is so old that its initial release coincided with Wasif’s time in lowercase. The ramshackle title track from Will Oldham’s 1999 debut as Bonnie “Prince” Billy gets a reverent cover from Wasif with the help of Best Coast’s Bobb Bruno on bass and synths and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Brian Chase on drums. “‘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,” Wasif recalls of his initial encounter with the track. “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. ”
Check out the cover—which has much more in common with Oldham’s music than it does lowercase’s noise rock—below, and read on for the full artist statement on the release, wherein we get some backstory on its heavy influence on Wasif over the years (and, incidentally, confirmation that Nothing were recording at Sonic Ranch in February with Bruno).
“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.
