Critics have struggled to categorize him. Pitchfork called his 2023 mixtape scrapyard_angel “a beautiful migraine.” Anthony Fantano described him as “what happens when you raise a JPEGMAFIA fan on a diet of early Owl City and mid-2000s screamo.” Himsa himself rejects the labels.
“When you show your face, people decide who you are before the first note drops,” he explains. “They see a white guy from the Midwest and think they know the story. But the story isn’t in my face. It’s in the feedback.” noah himsa
His production process mirrors this ethos. He composes primarily on a hacked Nintendo 3DS and a 2008 Dell laptop that he insists on keeping unplugged from the internet. “The latency, the glitches, the random crashes—that’s not a bug. That’s the collaborator.” He records vocals in a closet lined with egg-crate foam, but he deliberately introduces digital artifacts: bit-crushing, spectral folding, and what he calls “buffer underrun poetry.” Critics have struggled to categorize him
For an artist built on distortion, the most radical act may be clarity. The final track on his last EP, , ends with a full minute of silence, then a single, unprocessed recording: himsa, without modulation, humming a folk melody—maybe a hymn, maybe a lullaby—before the hard drive clicks off. “They see a white guy from the Midwest
That connection is visceral. At a recent show in a Brooklyn warehouse, I watched a teenager sob during —a four-minute track that is little more than a distorted piano loop and himsa repeating “I’m trying to be soft but the world keeps asking for shrapnel” until his voice cracks. After the set, the teenager approached the stage. Himsa, still hidden behind the static veil, reached down and placed a single cracked guitar pick in their palm. No words. Just a broken thing, shared. The Future Is a Corrupted File So what comes next? Rumors swirl of a full-length LP titled $u1c1d3_notes_pt._2 (a nod to Kurt Cobain, another fractured artist from the Pacific Northwest’s spiritual opposite). Himsa will only say this: “I’m learning to let the soft parts live. It’s harder than the noise.”
The line goes quiet. The voice note ends. And somewhere, on a dying laptop in a dark room, noah himsa is building another cathedral out of broken code—one glitch at a time.
“I don’t believe in the God they sold me,” he says. “But I believe in the shape of worship. The ritual. The kneeling. The surrender. I just replaced the altar with a DAW and the communion wafer with a low-pass filter.”