Archive for May, 2021
We’ve a penchant for trying to reduce the identity of an artist to one palatable line, something marketing friendly that can sum up a brand neatly and cleanly. Whether it’s queer pop, a regional band making psychedelia or my own personal brand as a digitally irrelevant post-tumblr blog idiot, we love to find easy cover alls and they’re rarely accurate. Except the post-tumblr bit, that’s largely correct. When it comes to ZAN, they’re fundamentally intersectional with layers of identity that don’t peel off individually. I’d love to simply say they’re a Perth artist, but they grew up in Tsukaba Japan before moving to Australia. More recently they’ve been spending time between Melbourne [Naarm], Perth [Boorloo], Lahore, LA and Haripur.
Their songs, the fruit of influences such as Bollywood, Sufi pop songs, Hindustani and Pakistani music and modern neo-soul (likely among others), are beautiful and haunting, none more so than brand new single ‘Tu’. While they’ve an EP behind them already, this song is an elevation. I hear everything from Twigs to Anohni, James Blake to The Weekend, sung in Urdu-Hindi. It’s Zan’s vocal that’ll bury you within seconds. I spent my first listen trying to navigate what elements of their vocal were synthetically modulated and which were just the natural quaver of their voice. In the end, it doesn’t matter in the slightest because however they arrived at this moment, they certainly arrived. We’d do well to note at this point that the track self-produced yet still sounds like this. Dwell on that.
The music video is compiled of found family footage and snippets of their father’s family travels and gatherings and worth watching so as this record hits just right…
Artists you need to know rn
| 1. 1300 |  |
316 |
| 2. Voidhood | |
259 | 3. jamesjamesjames | |
186 | 4. Zan | |
174 |
| 5. Sesame Girl | |
147 |
