“Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself,” says Miles Davis. It took Lars Finberg twenty-seven years. As leader of post-punk garage smart-asses The Intelligence, as well as stints drumming for psych rock all-stars Thee Oh Sees and Seattle’s experimental post-punk luminaries The A-Frames, Finberg honed the sharp but playful inversion of garage punk he’s become known for.
And now he debuts Witches Woo—a double LP that marks number 13 in the Intelligence catalog, or “number 3 in Phase 2” says Finberg, referencing transitional albums Lil’ Peril (2022) and Now, Squirm (2024), which both saw him drop everything he knew in search of new beginnings. His work on those two albums, as well as scoring a feature film, were the necessary steps towards a bigger and more authentic idea of what his music could be. Not that he wasn’t already singular—an idiosyncratic songwriter doing his best to stretch the limits of recognizable genres, Finberg earned his place as a cult favorite in the underground rock world. But Witches Woo ushers in a new era—this is music beyond genre, influence or convention. It’s music as direct extension of personality. It’s music that doesn’t come from the “Lars Finberg” persona, but from the person himself. It’s joyous, strange, vulnerable, and above all searching. It feels less like listening to a collection of songs than it does being led through a musical landscape that connects you directly to another person’s subconscious. It’s cinematic in its immersiveness, stripping away structure to expose the raw creative act, the inspiration and emotion at the heart of it. Witches Woo is eleven songs divided into four sections, one for each season, and it attempts to traverse, in 69 minutes, as big a space as one year of human life. It’s a symphony of electronic bedroom big band storytelling, chittering circuit board warbling vocals and lovelorn musings that ebb and flow like the aforementioned seasons. Songs build to cataclysmic bombardments of synthesizer experiments and sound collages, 808 drums pushed to the edges of celebratory disintegration and then, just before it all gets fried beyond comprehension, it clears away to find Lars alone with nothing more than acoustic guitar, fuzzy mic, and a collection of whispered, ruminative lyrics. Guests Alice Sandahl (La Luz), Jett Witchalls (Self-Improvement), Kate Blackstock, Mikal Cronin, Kannan Tupper and Energized Vase help fill out the landscape, but other than that, this is Lars himself, alone. And this is what he sounds like.
—Anthony Oberbeck 2026
