Shadow People

In San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, 26-year-old Ryan Grubbs, the lead singer of the scruffy four-piece Sacramento rock band Ganglians, found the perfect location to photograph the cover of the band’s second full-length album, Still Living (Lefse, August 23). “I put our guitarist Kyle in this white sheet and placed him all over the park’s fern forest,” says Grubbs of the trippy, vintage-hippy-inspired nature shot. The image, a deceptively serene representation of the group, complements the band’s psychedelic, ’60s-styled garagemeets-beach-rock sound, the latest of which is a bit more melodic—and much more cohesively groovetastic— than the band’s 2009 offerings. “I haven’t done acid in a while,” says Grubbs in explanation. “I think it’s really important to learn from it and then just move on.”