This week’s Listening Party focuses on local rockers Zula. Listening Party is a curated weekly column promoting music discovery and encouraging concert-going. Featuring someone we’ve been jamming out to and we recommend to the masses, each Listening Party artist has an upcoming show at a local NYC venue. Grab your headphones and read on.
WHO: Cousins Henry and Nate Terepka, Michael Lawless, Pablo Eluchans
THEY SAY: “experimental groove indie pop post-punk psychedelic New York”
WE SAY: Whoa.
FROM: Brooklyn, NY
ONLINE: https://www.zulamusic.net/
LABELS: Inflated Records
Recent Work: 2013’s This Hopeful
Upcoming Show: Next Tuesday 12/3 at Silent Barn ($10); Next Wednesday 12/4 at Death By Audio ($7)
This excellent band, who somehow flew beneath our radar until now, has all of the fixings we’ve been waiting to find in a local band. Their music has a range of sounds, placing listeners in some kind of futuristic sound-clad rainforest, dripping with glitch math beats, slowly oozing tropically progressive melodies, canopy above crowded with lonely, teetering layers of sound. Title track “This Hopeful” gets it oh-so-right: spacey, echoing synth billows, sewn among crunchy beats, minimal guitar strums and chords, angsty rock’n’roll vocals squeezed with enunciation and expression. Clearly drawing from some influences (Radiohead, Animal Collective) they fit alongside art-punk bands like Deerhunter and psychedelic voyeurs like Woodsman, but injected with a sexy, smooth, electronic energy. They are so damn GOOD, and on the verge of breaking big. See them next week at Silent Barn alongside all the other best bands Brooklyn’s got to offer (Twin Sister, Ava Luna, Celestial Shore) or Tuesday with Sean Nicholas Savage at Death By Audio. If you can’t make it they’re doing numerous other performances over the course of the month, see their site for more info.