On social media, summer 2026 was all about whimsy. Burnt out and bored, people started reincorporating playfulness into their lives with outfit updates and bedazzled everything. Up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the five members of Gash have been following their own spontaneous creative impulses for years. The experimental rock band began shaping its fourth album, at least you know what you’re laughing at, as a series of digital compositions uploaded to Google Drive and later workshopped them into songs that sparkle, billow, and occasionally jut out enough to draw blood. Stitched together as an eight-song collage, the album illustrates true whimsy in action: following impulses, chasing ribbons of fun, and remaining open to change—even when it might not pay off.
Gash love composing songs whose intersecting lines set the entire mood of the song—jarring, dreamy, or nostalgic—in the style of art-house sampling. Opener “good and bad” luxuriates in this structure. After a sample of a TV host catching up viewers on the suicidal subject of last week’s episode, founder Logan Nyberg plucks acoustic guitar and lays down smooth keys; Breckelle Bathke recounts a haunting presence in a close, breathy whisper; Eric Simmons taps out a stuttering, half-halting drum pattern; Mitchell Smuhl strums an open electric guitar; and a massive bass note blooms over everything, courtesy of Eric Christenson. The song is fluid and loose, and yet it’s arranged so tightly that, in the time it took to write the previous sentence, the whole thing played three times. Every sporadic instrumental addition is a limb on a centipede: slightly unnerving when fixated on, but mesmerizing when rotating in sync with the rest of the creature.
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Where their previous albums created heft through volume and distorted guitars, at least you know what you’re laughing at finds its weight in the richness of these arrangements. “data master” flips a trip-hop beat under looped vocal mumblings, the crunch of fried audio samples, and shrill tom hits; the near-manic stuttering guitar line in “professional” is anchored by rolling bass and distant whirring that’s hard to place. The closer you listen, the more sounds reveal themselves.