At one point in our conversation, Ry Minter informs me that “bugs are up right now”. Though the city’s recent teasings of spring have offered optimal conditions for a pest soiree, what Ry is referring to has less to do with the minor ant situation in my kitchen than it does a cutesy caterpillar on the cootie catcher tape currently dwelling in my cart on Bandcamp. From the quirky computer generated creature on the cover of “This is Real” to (T-T)b’s “Bug on the Ceiling” (and I supposed if we want to expand the conversation to insects there is that harrowing final track on the new Dutch Interior record titled “Beekeeping”), the infestation is a major win for eccentric music enthusiasts everywhere. Bugs are up, and today, so is Buff Ginger, with the release of disorienting and delightfully eerie new single, “i found a bug”.

Ry has been making music as Buff Ginger since 2021, although transforming her high school guitar hobby into the dopamine hit of crunchy, glitched out textures and dizzying melodies that the project boasts now was a bit of a learning curve. “I wrote this EP in 2021 that’s now gone from most platforms. When I hear it now I just hear weird indie rock,” Ry tells me of Buff Ginger’s earlier years. “After that I switched from GarageBand to Ableton, and I just learned a lot more about music production. I got a tape machine and a tascam and I also just bought more pedals. It took like a year and a half to obtain a lot of equipment and knowledge. New Jokes was the first thing I released where I was like, this is how it’s supposed to be, this is how it’s supposed to sound.” 

“i found a bug” both merits this badge of “how it’s supposed to sound” and severs Buff Ginger from a specific sonic niche. While it trades the animated and jaunty nature of New Jokes for a smoothed over, melancholic feel, its delicacy does not come at a cost to intensity.  The track paints an elaborate narrative, commencing with the line “i found a bug” over crisp acoustic chords, though the storyline grows increasingly unsettling as the surrounding soundscapes thicken, eventually blending hazy layers and Ry’s vocals into one. “I was harboring a lot of anger at something, and it just came out through that bug”, she tells me. Although the buildup in “i found a bug” presents as more subtle than the immediate potency of “Punchline” or “Giant Steps 2”, it fosters an equally chest-tightening, hair raising experience, rooted in the tangible emotion and distorted streams of enigmatic lyricism that Buff Ginger maneuvers so well. 

We recently got to sit down with Ry to discuss Instagram Reels rabbit holes, playing to a still room and the inspiration behind “i found a bug”. 

Manon: You mentioned this single is a bit different than your past music. What sort of sound were you going for, and what inspired it? 

Ry: This one was interesting because it started off as one really clean track with a lot more acoustic guitar and I tried to do a lot of destructive editing to it, basically just reversing and pitching and kind of destroying a lot of the recordings I had, just compressing the whole thing through the task cam. I just had a lot of fun with it. I was listening to a lot of “Waltz #1” by Elliot Smith, which is kind of an interesting pick, but I really wanted to make a song that was eerie and heavy but also pretty and light at the same time. Then it turned out nothing like that, and now it’s just kind of the way it is. 

Manon: I feel like you did nail that heavy but also light and pretty thing. I think the single is super heavy, not in a harsh way but in a, “I can feel this in my chest” way.  

Ry: That’s definitely what I was going for, that chest feeling. Because mine does that all the time, so it’s kind of like I’m sharing it with people

Manon: Tell me about this bug 

Ry:  I think I just wrote the first two phrases of the song in the lyrics and I was like “oh, this is kind of kitschy”, and thought maybe I’ll rewrite it, then it turned into this really elaborate thread. I think I was harboring a lot of anger at something, and it just came out through that bug, through me finding a bug and killing the bug and being really sad about it, which is sort of the thesis of the song. 

Manon: I like how elaborate it gets, I think it fits the pacing and feel of the song. What’s the sample you use at the beginning? 

Ry: I was really hoping you were going to ask this question

Manon: Of course 

Ry: Do you ever get really bad music on Instagram Reels ever? Like do you ever go down that rabbit hole? 

Manon: Yes but I feel like, not enough. I mostly see the really good, “bad” stuff when someone else sends it to me

Ry: That’s good. I’ve gone way too deep and it’s just all I get now and then a lot of them started being Star Seed related. It’s people who think that their soul is from an alien, but their body is a vessel from space and there are a bunch of different types. It’s basically zodiac signs for people who are like, “this is not enough. I need more”. 

I was really interested in what the whole community was like, so I went down this big rabbit hole one night, just researching and I found this semi adjacent thing, it’s this guy from the 80’s who’s a prophet for this entity called Kryon. He still does sermons every Wednesday but if you go to their old website that was made in the early 2000’s, don’t know if the correct term would be sermon, but basically every talk that he’s given where they all prey and summon Kryon and stuff is compiled into free to download MP3s. It’s just this huge archive of every talk he’s given, I think it goes back to 2002, all the way up to 2025. So if you’re looking for some guy talking about something really intensely, or something that has semi religious cult-y undertones, that’s the perfect place to go because it’s all just free, and you won’t get a virus… I think. I don’t think I have a virus from downloading any of it…I hope not. 

Manon: How long did it take for you to find the one you ended up using? 

Ry: Longer than I anticipated. I was listening to a lot of them and a lot of what he was saying either didn’t fit what I was going for or some of it was… problematic. So it was a lot of digging, I downloaded two and listened all the way through and when I heard the “I’m hearing you, plead with me”, I was like okay thats the one, that’s perfect because it can kind of crescendo into a very intense feel. Sometimes it’s fun to just dig, once you start looking for samples, it never feels like enough. Like “oh this one has too many views”, or “people will already know what this one is”. You have to get niche, and I think I went too far but I guess something came out of it. 

Manon: Have you played the single live yet? 

Ry: I was supposed to, and then I ended up getting sick before the terraplana show which was really sad because I love them, they’re so good. So we haven’t yet but I’m excited to, I think I’m going to use an acoustic electric for it. 

Manon: Do you have a favorite show you’ve ever played? 

Ry: It’s still crazy that I played this show because it was at a time when, personally, I don’t think the music was that great. We played with Full Body II at Trans Pecos, it was an oversold show so it was super hectic but really fun. There was another one recently that was really good, I have a hard time remembering because I have such bad stage fright, so I usually kind of black the whole thing out and then I wake up and I’m like, I hope that was good. I think the Glare show at Market Hotel was really fun. Also the birthday show was super special, just because it was snowing outside and it was all my friends and favorite musicians playing, and then everyone had a snowball fight afterwards. I think that one actually might be my favorite show ever, not just because I put it together, but because it was a very whimsical and magical time. 

Manon: Yeah hard to compete with a post show snowball fight, that’s so special. Also, you mentioned you get bad stage fright? 

Ry: Yeah, you would think eventually after doing it so many times it would eventually go away… well it hasn’t. It’s still there. But I just kinda muscle through it a lot of the time, which with a lot of things isn’t the healthiest thing to do, but playing a show is really fulfilling and always turns out to be super fun after, as long as you’re not too critical of yourself, and it feels really good when people enjoy the music. Even if the people aren’t enjoying the music, we have played to a still room many times and it’s kind of fun because if everyone is completely still it makes you want to do more. 

Manon: Like a dare 

Ry: Yeah, and it’s fun because in a way it kind of makes you angry, and then the anger fuels the performance. I remember there was one time, our second or third show we played at Berlin with this old head punk band and there were like forty to fifty 60-year-old punks from the East Village just standing around in the room. We played last, and the band everyone was there for went right before our set, so it was just like two old punk heads and then my parents and I was just rolling around on the floor for no reason. Like there’s not a song where I needed to be doing all of that. 

Manon: I mean sounds like perfect time to practice your rolling

Ry: It was. I got really dirty, it was a good time. 

Manon: I know you said there was some Elliot Smith inspiration for “i found a bug”, but what would you say are your favorite artists or general music inspirations lately? 

Ry: That’s so hard, I feel like it changes a lot. Recently a lot of my friends have been really inspiring me, like Crate and Shower Curtain. They have been doing super cool stuff and the demos that I’ve heard from both of them are really, really good. So I think that they’re a main, not direct source of inspiration, but they make me want to make better music you know, keep moving.

You can listen to “i found a bug” out everywhere now!

Written by Manon Bushong | Feature Photo Courtesy of Buff Ginger