Spiral Your Way Out by zzzahara
‘Spiral Your Way Out’ by zzzahara
One significant charm of indie pop is that it’s rarely keen to sound as contemporary as its mainstream counterpart. On Spiral Your Way Out, the third album from L.A.-based singer and songwriter zzzahara (a.k.a. Zahara Jaime, identifying as “they/them”), even the sonic quality suggests a taped-over analog cassette rather than a state-of-the-art digital recording. Because that suggestion happens with help from several co-producers and co-writers whose credits range from boygenius and Japanese Breakfast to Halsey, zzzahara evidently wants to cocoon broader musical efforts inside the bedroom-composed intimacy of earlier albums.
The intimacy of Spiral bespeaks more troubling closeness: the opening track, “It Didn’t Mean Nothing,” finds zzzahara unable to do anything but “lay in bed and scream,” trebly guitars and palpitating rhythms emphasizing the kind of romantic rage that burns far too much of itself out within the sufferer’s nervous system.
What doesn’t stay within zzzahara bleeds and sparks and spits out as songs, and their desire to flaunt hints about their influences is as evident as their desire to arrange pieces of their broken heart on their sleeve. If they don’t make it difficult to discern the Smiths and the livelier side of the Cure, pre-Disintegration, in “It Didn’t Mean Nothing,” then they more subtly tilt toward the breeziness of the Sundays and the Go-Betweens in “If I Had to Go I Would Leave the Door Closed Half Way,” and coyly bow to the soft melodicism of mid-period R.E.M. and the grungy riffs of the Breeders in “Ghosts.”
Yet zzzahara earns a place among their influences with vocals that are at once coolly androgynous and heatedly emotional. Spiral Your Way Out lets their feelings get out of control and then regains control through artistic thoughts. It is an indie-pop mix tape sent to us rather than to the object and subject of their former affection.
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