the ugly hug

Tag: Emily Moosbrugger

0 Stars Talks Creative Restrictions and Latest Release World No. 2 | Interview

January 29th, 2026

Written by Emily Moosbrugger | Photo Courtesy from 0 Stars

At the start of each year, 0 stars’ Mikey Buishas creates a bingo board. He organizes 25 new year’s resolutions neatly into squares and hangs them from his wall as a visual reminder. If he accomplishes five in a row in any direction, he gets a bingo. “I was thinking, this is the year I get off the notes app and I get a pencil,” he said.

Much of Buishas’ songwriting starts this way – through simple, self-imposed creative restrictions. Similar to getting off the notes app, a goal set with the intention of confronting his habit of overthinking lyrics, he collects pages and pages of games he’s invented to close the borders on himself creatively. Sometimes these are open-ended ‘write a song a day’ challenges, other times they’re based on more specific constraints, like writing a song without using any pronouns. “I think every record I’ve ever made, which is like 10 or something at this point, is usually just a collection of these dart thrown attempts at a song in 20 minutes before midnight type things,” he said.

Photo Courtesy of 0 Stars

To record World No. 2, his second album as 0 Stars, Buishas brought a collection of songs that he’d kept stored on his 8-track to the studio of his good friend and musical inspiration, Hunter Davidsohn. “I basically brought some reels up there where everything was out of tune. He just helped me, with his tape machine and my tape machine, sort of cobble together these things,” he said. Buishas and Davidsohn spent half a week with the reels, re-recording instrumental sections, re-doing some songs in different keys, stitching parts of different songs together and scrapping others entirely. “It’s kind of the first thing I’ve made that I feel 100% proud of and I think that’s largely because of my friend Hunter who helped record it,” Buishas said of the album.

Written over the span of the last six years, World No. 2 deals with the complexity of taking change as it comes and settling into life’s slowing pace as we grow older. “I wanted the burst of an immediate wind/ Started over and over and over and over/ Tipped over the poison/ Started again,” he sings gingerly on the album’s title track, a tender acoustic ballad echoing an ever-evolving attitude towards life’s unpredictability. Much of the beauty of World No. 2 is in the moments just after our momentum is lost; feedback hanging in the air after a guitar solo is abandoned, raindrops bursting on the windshield at an uncomfortably long red light, fragments of conversation still lingering on the walk back to the car. Like the feeling of quieting the mind with a long walk, it’s a reflection of slowing down and finding an abundance of comfort in the world that exists around you.

Buishas’ lighthearted approach to songwriting is reflected on “Jeanine,” a rocking 90-second song inspired by Arthur Russell’s “Janine.” “You know I want to write a song like ‘Janine,’” he explained of his thought process. “If I title it ‘Jeanine,’ okay I’m like 20% there and it just becomes a little game. And you’re like ‘oh maybe I should write about… I know a Jeanine!’ And now you’re like 30% there.” In the first half of the song, Buishas casually contemplates his mom’s thoughts about his musical pursuits: “Maybe if I start a band/ Jeanine would understand.” But as the song progresses, he creates a steady balance between his tongue-in-cheek lyrical storytelling and the self-doubt that comes with maintaining a long-term creative project: “It’s hard to say for sure/ How long this will endure/ I want to free you from the panic/ And plop you in the hammock.”

Throughout World No. 2, the songs shift between the driving, spirited indie-rock of “Jeanine” and the lush, intimate acoustic recordings of songs like “Link in Bio” and “They Say.” Others like “Atlantic” land somewhere in the middle, with dreamy, soft-rock verses punctuated by brisk electric guitars and a droning feedback section. “Atlantic” moves through a series of lyrical vignettes detailing the experience of running errands on a rainy day: “Mow me down at the DMV/ Make me frown, make me see/ That I’m nothing without my documents.” Like “Jeanine,” there is push and pull between comedy and introspection that gives the everyday occurrences Buishas writes about a layer of absurdity. But there is also tension between the way he depicts beauty and mundanity that gives these lyrical situations their own surreal feeling, like being caught somewhere between a daydream and reality. It’s that feeling that makes World No. 2 feel so unique and so intimate.

“I like pointing to something and alluding to something else that maybe isn’t there. So maybe what would’ve been funnier is ‘World No. 3,’ because wait, what happened to ‘World No. 2?’ Or what are the confines of this world? What is ‘World No. 1?’” Buishas asked, explaining his thinking behind the album’s title. “I think it means a hundred different things depending on what point in the album I’m in, but basically just a different kind of Heaven that you think exists and then find out you’re already living in it.”

You can listen to World No. 2 out now as well as get it on cassette via Worm Records.
h. pruz Embraces Warning Signs on Red Sky at Morning | Feature

November 10th, 2025
The title of h. pruz’s Red Sky at Morning references a line from a 2,000-year-old phrase cited in the New Testament: “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight/ Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” The expression, commonly used by mariners as a tool for predicting dangerous weather, was recited to Hannah Pruzinsky as a child by their mother when a storm was underway. But on Red Sky at Morning, Pruzinsky gives new meaning to the phrase, signaling the painful premonitions that hold them back in their own life and choosing to continue forward in spite of uncertainty.

The record was recorded in a small, quaint cottage in upstate New York by Pruzinsky and their partner Felix Walworth. “I really admire Felix’s tastes,” Pruzinsky said. “It’s hard to find a collaborator that I trust.” The record is peppered with Walworth’s Wurlitzer and electronics, drifting carefully through Pruzinsky’s finger-picked guitar melodies and delicate vocals. About a year after Pruzinsky wrote the songs, the two of them spent the month of January accompanied by their cat, recording equipment and the house’s collection of creepy dolls, making the cottage both a home and a studio for those few cold weeks.

Photo by Olivia Gloffke

Red Sky at Morning was described by Pruzinsky as being largely about a journey. Much of that journey involves looking inward and seeking comfort in the familiar. Their findings resurface as what feel like kaleidoscopic reflections – the skin of their lover’s palm, an old memory of gardening with their older brother, the sound of the creaking floorboards in their house. Traces of familiarity follow Pruzinsky, mirroring their movements and changes, unfolding in constant evolution. “I try to write about what has happened to me because it feels the most visceral and impactful,” Pruzinsky said. But even in its intimacy, Pruzinsky’s storytelling is steeped in mystery. “I think the ghosts are gone from the house/ But there used to be something,” they whisper on “Krista”, as if letting the listener in on a childhood secret before confessing: “I think it was something I wasn’t supposed to know about.”

Pruzinsky’s ability to play with perception is what makes the record feel like wandering through a place both otherworldly and deeply familiar. A self-proclaimed lover of narrative, adventure games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pruzinsky said they love any opportunity to “create and interrogate a world.” At some points throughout Red Sky at Morning, that world is as vast as an open sky, a lifetime of memory passing, followed by the promise of uncertainty. But often it is as narrow as the confines of one’s own body, every detail brought to focus under the stifling pressure of stillness. “We haven’t left the house in weeks/ I start to see you in the t.v. screen,” they sing on “Arrival” with a slow, sinking delivery, mirroring the feeling of being slowly consumed by motionlessness. The song is about the discomfort that arises from a static, domestic lifestyle and the ease at which familiarity shifts between a source of comfort and of anxiety. But in the face of inner turmoil, Pruzinsky makes clear their determination for acceptance in the repeated line in the song’s bridge: “I can clear the cycle.”

Photo by Olivia Gloffke

If Red Sky at Morning symbolizes a journey, that determination is the force driving it. On “After Always,” Pruzinsky depicts a slow descent into complete consumption: “I sink under you/ I am all of you/ And I breathe out the rest.” That imagery later returns on the album’s closer, “Sailor’s warning,” as Pruzinsky sings of being covered by mud with “eyes directed to the sun.” Their tone seems brighter here, as if they have chosen to allow themself to “sink under,” to willingly become enveloped in the unknown.

Between lush vocal layers and electronic swells on “Sailor’s warning,” all of the fears that Pruzinsky pours over throughout the record are whittled down to their core. “I know that you will change and I will too,” they remark before ending the record with a question that sings like an invitation, beckoning us forward into our own discomfort: “Don’t you know a warning sign when you see it?”

View more photos of h. pruz taken by Olivia Gloffke
You can listen to Red sky at morning out now as well as on vinyl released via Mtn. Laurel Recording Co.

Written by Emily Moosbrugger | All Photos by Olivia Gloffke