Zsela – Big For You (2024) [FLAC 24bit/44,1kHz]

Zsela – Big For You (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 32:30 minutes | 355 MB | Genre: Art Pop, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Mexican Summer

Zsela (ZHAY-la) knows that artistic arrivals take time. Five years since the hypnotic hush of her first single, 2019’s “Noise,” the ambitious artist has emerged with a debut album that is as much a force to be reckoned with as it is raw and vulnerable. Produced alongside close collaborators Daniel Aged (Frank Ocean, FKA twigs) and Gabe Wax (The War On Drugs, Soccer Mommy), Big For You effortlessly flows between grandiosity and intimacy to build a sonic landscape blossoming with introspection. The record is a quantum leap for an artist who has already taken giant strides as a performer in the years since her inaugural release, sharing stages with Cat Power, Caroline Polachek, Blood Orange, and Angel Olsen, not to mention appearances at the likes of Carnegie Hall and MoMA PS1 in New York and the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.

Apart from the core songwriting and production trio of Zsela, Aged, and Wax, the album also contains cameos from several members of the artist’s extended family of collaborators. Enigmatic experimentalist Marc Ribot and seasoned session player Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) both sit in on guitar, neo-psych polymath Nick Hakim offers background vocals, and Jasper Marsalis (Slauson Malone 1) often sat behind the boards and contributed additional production and programming.

As a full length opening statement, Big For You bears the fruit of Zsela’s unrushed creative process. The album emphasized the expansive tension and release of a journey rather than its destination, one that the artist herself has compared to “trying to welcome uncertainty like a warm embrace. It is the work of a sonic storyteller who has settled into a groove of her own, unafraid to ask unanswered questions.“I had four years to make this album, and that was a painful privilege,” the artist acknowledges. “When you have that much time to incubate a project, the answers are eventually revealed.”Zsela does things on her own timeline. Her intriguing first EP, Ache of Victory, was released in 2020 after she had been working on the songs for five years. Now it’s taken another four for the singer-songwriter to release her debut album. Part art pop, part R&B, it is a showcase for her remarkable, singular voice: elastic and supernatural, her low contralto fills every corner to stunning effect. Opener “Lily of the Nile”—like Sade from another planet—is a shock to the system that makes you go back again and again for another listen, just to try and figure out how Zsela does what she does. (“Even when I was a kid, people would be, like, ‘You sound old,'” she told the New York Times.) She’s like a specter, contrasting barely-there instrumentation on the chill-inducing “Watersprite.” But “Fire Excape” is all sultry R&B that veers from stark to big washes of synth sounds; “There’s a fire in the ocean,” Zsela sings, lingering on that last syllable as the reverse reverb of splashy high-hat puts an exclamation point on her phrasing. “Not Your Angel” stirs up a quiet storm.

There are pops of intensity, as on super smoky “Moth Dance,” that bring to mind FKA Twigs; indeed, co-producer Daniel Aged has worked with both women, as well as Frank Ocean, and brings an intriguing experimental feel to the proceedings. It’s a playfulness that runs in Zsela’s blood as well. Born Zsela Thompson, she is the daughter of Marc Anthony Thompson—aka Chocolate Genius, who has made great records on his own and as the leader of Chocolate Genius Inc., the collective that has included avant jazz masters Marc Ribot, Vernon Reid, Chris Wood and John Medeski. Ribot is a contributor on Big for You, as are Nick Hakim, Casey MQ and Jasper Marsalis, who makes music as Slauson Malone 1 and is, yes, of that lineage. He co-produces “Easy St.,” which casts Zsela’s spoken word over drifting, almost unmoored guitar that moves at its own pace. There are shades of her dad’s neo-soul background on “Brand New” and “Now Here You Go,” a slip of a song that finds Zsela trying more of a babydoll voice. And while she sounds careful and controlled on “Still Swing”—moody with contemplative guitar—you get the feeling that, if Zsela wanted to, she could pack a wallop. Hopefully we’ll get to hear her try it out sooner than a few years. – Shelly Ridenour

Tracklist:

1-01. Zsela – Lily of the Nile (03:51)
1-02. Zsela – Fire Excape (03:18)
1-03. Zsela – Not Your Angel (02:59)
1-04. Zsela – Still Swing (03:40)
1-05. Zsela – Watersprite (03:50)
1-06. Zsela – Brand New (03:43)
1-07. Zsela – Now Here You Go (00:55)
1-08. Zsela – Easy St. (02:52)
1-09. Zsela – Moth Dance (04:17)
1-10. Zsela – Play (03:02)

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