| The summer after he graduated from high school, Battle broke ground on his first album as Katzin. He had just spent most of the summer in Europe, and came back to the United States inspired to explore what it means to be an American at this particular moment in history. What stories cling to people born and raised in this infinitely complex, haunted country, and what responsibilities do we have to them? Buckaroo swirls around these heated questions like smoke from a campfire at dusk. Together with collaborator and producer Max Morgen, Battle drove from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree to start recording songs he’d written the previous spring. “It was a really anxious time. We were both heading off to college, getting ready to leave our homes and move to new states,” he says. “We packed up Max’s Subaru Impreza and set up a DIY recording studio in a cabin. It was really hot, and we were stuck inside. By isolating ourselves, we were able to capture this raw creative energy. It feels like we made a love letter to our childhoods.” “Nantucket” captures the continent traversing ambition of the album, as Battle explains: “’Nantucket’ is about a comedown, sobering up, perhaps washing up on a familiar shore. Several coastlines are implied in the lyrics, both east and west. It’s also about Meghan Trainor because she’s obviously the only girl who’s really from Nantucket. It’s all about that bass, no treble.” |
In February, Mexican Summer-signee Katzin will release his debut LP Buckaroo. The project of the New York based songwriter Zion Battle, Katzin’s debut draws upon symbols of the mythologized American West – cowboys, horses, vast deserts, rolling plains, ancient rock formations – to trace that leap from adolescence to adulthood in all its unsteady shine.
Surging with rolling drums, filigreed synthesizers, and guitars that flip from a whisper to a thunder roll on a dime, Buckaroo renders the beauty of North America through a deceptively nonchalant electroacoustic collage. “One of our main goals was to make the album sound like the desert,” says Battle. “We talked about that a lot: How do we make the soundscape reflect the landscape?” Throughout the record, Battle blends the surreal wit of Pavement with the expansive gravitas of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, all while drawing from the warm, homespun atmospherics of early Orchid Tapes releases. These songs arc like contrails across the biggest sky you’ve ever seen.
Katzin has so far shared two singles from the record “Anna” and “Wild Horses,” and today he is sharing a third, a track called “Nantucket” that is premiering with FLOOD.
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR “NANTUCKET”
The summer after he graduated from high school, Battle broke ground on his first album as Katzin. He had just spent most of the summer in Europe, and came back to the United States inspired to explore what it means to be an American at this particular moment in history. What stories cling to people born and raised in this infinitely complex, haunted country, and what responsibilities do we have to them? Buckaroo swirls around these heated questions like smoke from a campfire at dusk.
Together with collaborator and producer Max Morgen, Battle drove from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree to start recording songs he’d written the previous spring. “It was a really anxious time. We were both heading off to college, getting ready to leave our homes and move to new states,” he says. “We packed up Max’s Subaru Impreza and set up a DIY recording studio in a cabin. It was really hot, and we were stuck inside. By isolating ourselves, we were able to capture this raw creative energy. It feels like we made a love letter to our childhoods.”
“Nantucket” captures the continent traversing ambition of the album, as Battle explains:
“’Nantucket’ is about a comedown, sobering up, perhaps washing up on a familiar shore. Several coastlines are implied in the lyrics, both east and west. It’s also about Meghan Trainor because she’s obviously the only girl who’s really from Nantucket. It’s all about that bass, no treble.”
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Tom at Terrorbird Media.]
