Noah Gundersen was on stage, guitar in hand, performing songs he no longer believed in when his body said what his brain had been avoiding. “Tunnel vision. No desire to keep doing what I was doing,” he says now. “It was like—this could be my future? I don’t like it.”
That moment—call it an anxiety attack, a creative exorcism, or the sound of an artist hitting the wall—became the rupture that birthed White Noise, Gundersen’s boldest, biggest-sounding album to date. “It’s a different kind of vibe,” he admits, “but I needed to feel creatively fulfilled again. I didn’t want to just play the sad acoustic guy on stage for the rest of my life.”
This isn’t your moody-boy-with-a-guitar record. There are synths. Beats. Hooks that hit like heartbreak on the dance floor. And while longtime fans might’ve braced for impact, Gundersen says many of them stuck around for the transformation. “I didn’t know what people would think,” he says. “But I’ve been bored with myself. I had to evolve as a person and an artist.”
To get there, he wrote. A lot. “Fifty, sixty songs,” he estimates. “Maybe twenty-five before I hit the ones that made the record.” Every morning at the piano. “It’s not glamorous. But inspiration doesn’t just strike—you have to be standing in the open field when the lightning hits.”
One of the biggest shifts came when he brought in producer Nate Yaccino. “He challenged me. Got me out of my comfort zone. It wasn’t just me repeating what I’d already done, and I needed that.”
It’s a record that sounds like a statement, but Gundersen says it’s more of a confession. “There’s so much noise right now—information, social media, presidents saying insane shit, the 24-hour news cycle. I wasn’t trying to offer answers. I just wanted to say, ‘I feel overwhelmed too.’”
The title track, White Noise, channels that exact feeling. “It’s ironic, though, because now I’m doing a press cycle contributing to that noise,” he laughs. Still, he's trying to carve out peace where he can: yoga, meditation, long motorcycle rides, fewer screens. “Being intentional is almost countercultural now,” he says. “But I’m trying.”
Despite the heaviness, White Noise isn’t a sad record—at least not entirely. “I don’t think I’m a particularly sad person,” he says. “But there’s a lot of abstraction in the lyrics, a mood. I want people to interpret it for themselves.”
That said, he understands why people might ask, “Are you okay?” after listening. “It’s a fair question,” he says, chuckling. “But nah—I’m just trying to make something that matters. That maybe makes people feel something. Or even just dance.”
And while White Noise is the main event, Gundersen has other irons in the fire: his band Young in the City is on a break, but not dead. There's another side project, Viscous, in the works. Producing for other artists. “I like having a few boxes to play in,” he says. “It keeps me sane.”
Maybe he’s not trying to save the world. But in a landscape of digital sludge, Gundersen’s White Noise is hard to ignore.
“It’s only white noise,” he says, “if you can ignore it.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out "The Sound" below!
