Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
With warped drum machines, warbled guitars, and a uniquely bugged out earnestness, the twitchy lo fi guitar music of Los Angeles native zzzahara’s earliest releases has mostly sat in indie spaces defined by David Dean Burkhart’s keen Compact Cassette curation and the “Bedroom Pop” tag on RYM. liminal spaces and Tender, their previous solo outings, found ways to make hooky, slapdash pop music feel bigger than the sum of its parts, though it positioned the project next to other excellent, albeit often hobbyist, hypnagogic pop artists ranging from Airhockey to Bedtime Khal, CASTLEBEAT to Sports Coach. Even if its remarkable streaming success feels noteworthy, Siblings, their collaborative record with Eyedress as The Simps, exists broadly in a digital feeling vacuum perpetuated by YouTube playlists and SoundCloud mixes.
zzzahara’s latest, Spiral Your Way Out, is a noticeable jump up from the aforementioned music, specifically on a sonic level. It’s a measured and, at times, remarkably succinct pop rock record that skews far away from the algorithm that likely led you to zzzahara in the first place. The wiry, gloomy lo-fi guitars are still a defining aspect of many of the songs, but they’re now natural evolutions to that bedroom pop sound—opener “It Didn’t Mean Nothing” in particular is an all out blitz, with a stringy bounce to the instrumental that ambitiously leans more girl in red than Acid Ghost.
“It Didn’t Mean Nothing” acts as a perfect bridge song, spaced out enough to hold your hand into the big rock choruses, bubblegrunge hooks, and tight earworm melodies that broadly define Spiral Your Way Out’s best moments. Each and every single on this album rings out as a pronounced and defining statement of growth, both musically and personally; while big indie labels like Polyvinyl and Partisan are spending countless resources to get artists like Momma and Blondshell to break into the major label boys club that is alternative radio, zzzahara is casually offering up cuts like “In Your Head” or “Ghosts” that, in a different world, would fit into the same conversation. The “three-month burst that let all their pent-up frustrations loose” that zzzahara references in the liner notes was clearly a fruitful one that led to a louder, more single focused album. I defy you to ignore the early 2000s chic of “Wish You Would Notice (Know This)” or “If I Had to Go I Would Leave the Door Closed Half Way,” or the big shoegazey arena sound of “Head in a Wheel.”
zzzahara describes pent up anger as defining much of the studio experience for Spiral Your Way Out: “in the end, I just took it all out on the record.” That emotional frustration brilliantly reveals itself through songs that have a bright urgency and a unique pop intensity. As such, quieter moments like “Pressure Makes a Diamond,” or closing numbers “Bluebird” and “NY NY” quietly fade into the background, in some ways recalling the cloudier, lingering atmospheric tone of previous projects. We’ve heard zzzahara perfect those ideas in previous records, and they’re more monochrome by comparison to the rest of the album—a small price to pay when the highs are as high as they are; artists much bigger with much bigger budgets will struggle to put out two genuinely great radio singles, let alone five revelatory ones. Whoever their publisher is should get zzzahara in some writing camps stat, there’s gold in them hills.
Disappointing / Average / Good / Great / Phenomenal
Spiral Your Way Out is out now.
––
CJ Simonson | @cjsimonson
The Alternative is ad-free and 100% supported by our readers. If you’d like to help us produce more content and promote more great new music, please consider donating to our Patreon page, which also allows you to receive sweet perks like free albums and The Alternative merch.