Zahara Jaime (zzzahara) believes in keeping things chill. They were first inspired to embrace their love of emo by hanging out at a skatepark, of all places, discovering the laidback slack of Daniel Johnston and Pixies while couchsurfing at an older skater dude’s crash pad. That led Jaime to explore their love of Johnny Marr and “little riffs here and there”, as they put it to Thrasher Magazine.
Skateboarding, particularly skate videos, is a good allegory for zzzahara’s music. On the surface, they seem to glide along effortlessly, radiating a cool, calm composure, belying the heat, friction, gravity, and speed begging to bring them down. The skate videos that first inspired Jaime to move away from metal and hardcore add further levels of abstraction, artistry, and chill, overlaying the gravity-ignoring, death-defying stunts with funky breakbeats, jangling guitars, experimental camera angles, and lens flares.
Despite its laid-back demeanor, Spiral Your Way Out is rooted in darkness. Jaime describes it as their “post-break-up” album. The opener and lead single, “It Didn’t Mean Nothing”, layers a sugary-sweet vocal about screaming in bed over tangy jangle guitars and jacked-up backbeats. “Pressure Makes a Diamond” pairs claustrophobia and imminent collapse with chiming guitars and ambient sunset synthesizers.
“Head in a Wheel” puts a lyric about being spiritually dead over a “Secret Agent Man” riff and a Jiffy Pop drum explosion at the end. Spiral Your Way Out is full of hard, dark emotions, but it’s all about making the best of things, something Jaime’s been doing since they were a kid. In that same interview with Thrasher Magazine linked above, they talked about growing up Filipino in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where they described themselves as “like a latchkey kid”.
“I was more neglected than a latchkey kid. And a lot of my friends in Highland Park were either in gangs or, I don’t even know. I was into a lot of bad shit when I was younger. I was using drugs at 12, and we were impoverished and had nothing to do.” Rock ‘n roll and skateboarding gave Jaime purpose, allowing them to direct their energies towards something productive and positive, contrary to what the paranoia of the 1980s warned against.
The upgraded production values certainly help. Spiral Your Way Out is the first time zzzahara have worked with outside producers in an official studio. Alex Craig, former guitarist of Ducktails, provides a suitably dreamy mix on “Wish You Were Here (Know This)”, a highlight, coating the twanging, bouncing guitar line in layers of gauzy reverb, like peach neon in a sea of fog.
Grammy Award-nominee and Illuminati Hotties mastermind Sarah Tudzin brings the action a bit closer and in focus while still sounding romantic and relaxed, with a pulsing guitar line ever-so-slightly burned around the edges. Zzzahara have never sounded so rich and so full, bringing depth and dynamics to their addictively melodic dreamworld. Hopefully, this will help bring their music to a broader audience as they are one of the decade’s more exciting, talented, and relentlessly prolific indie bands.
Finding brightness in hardship is something Los Angeles has always excelled at. Despite the earthquakes and wildfires, long bouts of 100-plus-degree temperatures that make your soul want to melt, the exorbitant cost of living, and some of the worst income inequality in recorded history, LA music is almost exclusively sunny and bright. Even their punk and metal sound oddly upbeat, more likely to encourage crushing tallboys on your forehead than burning down churches.
In Jaime’s case, they combine Los Angeles’ inherent sunshiny, cool optimism with a hard upbringing. When you’re dealing with real hardship, real grief, and lack, you don’t moan about it. You don’t curl up and surrender. You learn to make the best of things.
Spiral Your Way Out is about making the best of a bad situation, of transforming darkness into light. It’s a bittersweet testament to the spirit of Los Angeles, currently making the best of one of the worst disasters in the city’s history. zzzahara offer a way forward, meeting every grief with a “What, me worry?” shrug while delivering one of the most delicious, addictive, effortlessly cool indie records of the year so far.