Interview with The Zolas
We had the pleasure of interviewing The Zolas over Zoom video!\xa0
From of the far-flung shores of British Columbia and two decades late for the cover of\xa0Select Magazine, The Zolas prove with\xa0Come Back to Life\xa0that you can take a step back to move forward.
\u201cIn our jam space we started fucking around with this nostalgic vibe: like a warped memory of the Britpop music we obsessed over as kids but never got to make. Eventually it seemed obvious we had to follow that feeling and make an album of it. I had just come off a long period of writing pop music for other people [including \u2018L.A. Hallucinations\u2019 from Carly Rae Jepsen\u2019s critically acclaimed album\xa0Emotion] and a co-writing trip in Europe [with artists such as Starsailor\u2019s James Walsh] and it was a spiritual thing to be in a dank room playing loud with our band again.\u201d
Several years since the release of 2016\u2019s radio-smashing, Juno-nominated breakthrough\xa0Swooner, the group was ready to start a new cycle and a new direction. \u201cWe thought it was hilarious to make a Britpop record at a time when nobody but us is listening to that,\u201d Gray muses. \u201cbut we have our little clique and that made us more excited to do what we want and say fuck it to how it might be received.\u201d
The frontman describes\xa0Come Back to Life\xa0as a collision between the soundtracks for Danny Boyle\u2019s culture-jamming\xa0Trainspotting\xa0and Baz Luhrmann\u2019s radical re-imagining of\xa0Romeo + Juliet.\xa0\u201cThis is the 21st century heir to those soundtracks,\u201d he declares. But for all the swaggeringly self-confident vocals and soaring wonderwall guitars on epics like \u201cYung Dicaprio\u201d and \u201cMiles Away\u201d, the Zolas aimed for more than carbon copying a classic sound.
\u201cThere\u2019s so many sounds we love that came out of the mid-90s UK; britpop and acid-house and trip-hop all carrying on in parallel scenes.\xa0\xa0If felt right to cross-pollinate this album with all of that,\u201d Gray says. \u201cSo we\u2019d write simple songs in our jam space and then steal sounds from the Prodigy or Primal Scream or the Happy Mondays or Tricky whenever it felt good.\u201d
While\xa0Come Back to Life\xa0is an unrepentantly joyful sonic love letter to a magical time, the Zolas aren\u2019t afraid to get serious on the lyrical side of things.
\u201cHonestly every album I\u2019ve ever written is about nostalgia and the apocalypse and this one\u2019s no different\u201d Gray laughs, \u201cbut looking at it now these songs feel really specific to our moment in time. It\u2019s a cross-section of conversations I\u2019ve had\xa0\xa0and overheard in these past few years. Conversations we\u2019ve all been a part of whether we like it or not.\u201d
Come Back to Life\xa0touches on everything from waking up to Canada\u2019s appalling treatment of its First Nations (\u201cWreck Beach/Totem Park\u201d) to global wealth disparity (\u201cI Feel the Transition\u201d) to artists being priced out of the cities they\u2019ve helped make great (\u201cBombs Away\u201d).
Gray is at his most potently poignant on \u201cPrEP\u201d, which came out of a reddit thread asking users to share their first-hand accounts of the \u201980s AIDS epidemic. \u201cI\u2019ve cried at more than a few reddit threads, but never like this. Everybody should read this.\u201d
\u201cMy dad [playwright John MacLachlan Gray] was in theatre, so in lots of baby photos I\u2019m being held by friends of his I don\u2019t recognize,\u201d Gray reminisces. \u201cOne day I asked him about them, and it turns out every one of them are gone. They were probably gone within five years of the pictures being taken. Now by some miracle HIV is totally manageable and it pisses me off that we\u2019re not all out there celebrating the light at the end of such a long, dark tunnel.\u201d
Consider, then,\xa0Come Back to Life\xa0being inspired by the past on multiple levels, quite rightly making the Zolas thrilled about the band\u2019s future.
\u201cI\u2019m dead happy just being in this band right now. We love making noise together, we\u2019re chasing the same vision, and lyrically I\u2019ve never felt more on it,\u201d Gray says with a brashness straight from the bucket-hatted heyday of Britpop. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to have a Kanye moment where you look at your output and go \u2018This is the greatest shit that\u2019s coming out this year.\u2019 As cute Canadians we tend to shy away from feeling ourselves like that but it\u2019s the truth.\u201d
We want to hear from you! Please email\xa0Tera@BringinitBackwards.com.
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