Zsela - Big For You (2024) [Hi-Res]

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.”