NYC art-rock five-piece Ecce Shnak is bombastically stoked to release their third single “Anna O” from their upcoming full-length album Dandy Variances, which is slated for release on October 23, 2026. “Anna O” is a jump-off-the-couch, roaring-the-hook anthem with big grunge energy. For the first time, Ecce Shnak’s composer/baritone/bassist David Roush defers his lyric-writing duties to someone else. His mother, Robin Kneubuhl, wrote a poem months before he and his producer, Jeff Lucci, cooked up a noisy instrumental in March 2019. Roush and Lucci tried the poem out as a lyric, and it fit just right.
Kneubhul has described her poem as a lament about tragic contradictions in contemporary feminist thought and practice. While Kneubuhl wholeheartedly believes in feminism’s ideals, she is concerned that it is misused toward nefarious ends, to the detriment of women and others alike. The song’s tragic hero embodies both a noteworthy psychoanalytic patient of Freud’s protégé Josef Breuer and the real-life gun-slinging heroine Annie Oakley. Though Anna is beleaguered by the contradictions Kneubuhl observes in the poem’s story, she ultimately emerges triumphant in the fight against patriarchy by the song’s end.
LISTEN TO “ANNA O”
The music video is a third collaboration between Ecce Shnak and LA-based film producer DJay Brawner. It stars Ecce Shnak’s soprano, Bella Komodromos, as Anna. Her character is deeply distressed in captivity, as she seems wrongfully entrapped in an asylum. However, through an act of heroic resistance, she overthrows her abusive doctor and his servile aide. She sets herself free while the mighty rock band Ecce Shnak plays her homage as loudly and wildly as they can.
While Ecce Shnak’s songs draw on a wide array of styles, fans of Nirvana, the Pixies, and the Jesus Lizard will likely latch onto “Anna O” quite tenaciously. Though they are in the process of firming up the specifics, Ecce Shnak can’t wait to play it for the Shnakiverse and music lovers generally on tour this Fall.
If there’s a fine line between wild-eyed, inspired genius and utter, irrepressible insanity, that’s where you’ll find Ecce Shnak, teetering on a neon tightrope.
“The present-day composer in America refuses to die,” was a famous statement from French avant-garde musician Edgar Varese quoted by Frank Zappa on the Mothers of Invention’s 1966 album, Freak Out!. New Haven, CT-born, New York City-based David Roush is living proof of that adage with his own musical project Ecce Shnak (pronounced Eh-kay Sh-knock) – the name taken from both Frederick Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (“ecce” meaning Latin for ‘Consider” or “Look At”) and a word derived from the Yiddish schnockered, meaning inebriated, but repurposed as a teenager for anything he needed it to describe. That may well be the best way to describe Ecce Shnak’s unique mash-up musical universe, a world of his own design he describes as Chamber Punk – “one part popular music, another part classical and a third part punk” with songs “about love, death, sex, change, bravery and food.”
The group subvert notions of style, playfully but reverently embracing multiple forms from across the spectrum, frequently within a single tune, while addressing weighty themes and notable trivia with striking articulacy. “Each genre has its own manner of expression, mannerisms, history, motivations, virtues, flaws, limitations, and so on,” Roush says. “At my best as a composer and lyricist, I listen to and respect each one, then whatever I take from their souls informs mine, inhabiting it, expanding, and merging.”
This musical mash-up offers a host of influences, including Gogol Bordello, Bjork, Deerhoof, Bad Brains, the Clash, and the Roots. Roush counts titans of classical music among his teachers: Claude Debussy, Franz Schubert, Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Leo Brouwer, among others.
With Roush as composer, bassist, and one of two singers, he is joined by Bella Komodromos (vocals), Chris Krasnow (guitar), Gannon Ferrell (guitar), and Henry Buchanan-Vaughn (drums).
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