Canadian songwriter Imaad Wasif kicked off 2026 with his highly personal solo album Superconsciousness, a reflection on life in the wake of the LA wildfires—among other, broader ruminations—from a much more optimistic perspective than he might have embraced in the immediate aftermath of the January 2025 disasters. Six months later he returned with an even more contemplative release: Demon’s Way, an EP of minimalist dark-folk compositions he recorded with Bobb Bruno to counteract the colorful intricacies of his prior release. Among those four songs was the EP closer “Grow,” the light at the end of what feels like a murkily psychedelic passage.
“I’m trying to reconnect to the embryonic pure state, outside of all the insanity of the world right now,” Wasif shares of the track, which he notes was an attempt at channeling both Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” “This is the most vulnerable thing I can do. It’s about correcting a path to self-destruction—the end of the world, holding yourself accountable to your truths and failings and accepting a path towards growth and change. I was paying homage to my love of the acoustic guitar. I layered four different guitars in different tunings to achieve a sound that felt like the glistening chimes of icicles falling on a Sunday morning coming down.”
Like the video for “We Are Hunters” he shared with us earlier this year, the clip for “Grow” he’s debuting today is both cinematic and conceptual, paying respect to the existential journey at the track’s core with more literal references to Southwestern road movies. “Set in the high desert, Imaad appears as a dark figure wandering the landscape,” director Astara Calas shares. “A contrasting character loosely inspired by the lonesome gunslinger of Jodorowsky’s El Topo and Bob Fosse’s Snake in the 1974 film The Little Prince. I also thought of him as the Fool in the tarot: a figure at the edge of a new journey, embodying infinite potential and the leap of faith into the unknown. In a way, the character became less a role and more an archetype—someone moving through an unfamiliar landscape toward whatever comes next.”
Check out the video below, and catch Wasif on the remaining dates of his West Coast Acoustic Obscura tour, where he’ll be playing stripped-down versions of his Superconsciousness cuts alongside those of the Demon’s Way EP. He’ll be hitting LA’s Philosophical Research Society this Saturday, but you can find the full list of upcoming dates here.
