Patiently headed for ‘Victory’
Rising star Zsela makes debut EP an emotional workout
With a spellbinding voice and a bold, confessional and unconventional songwriting style, Zsela and musical genius seems like a nice fit. But the 25-year-old took some time to make sure music was what she wanted.
“There was a lot of fear around choosing music because of some inherent expectations,” Zsela said from Los Angeles. “I wondered, ‘If I have a good voice is that what I should do because I come from a family of artists?’ So it took me a minute to come to music on my own. I need to figure out if there were other options that made me happy. Then I realized, it always came back to music.”
Zsela’s family has artistic range. Her parents are fine art photographer Kate Sterlin and musician Marc Anthony Thompson (aka Chocolate Genius); her sister is actress Tessa Thompson. But Zsela’s work is singular.
Released in April, her debut EP, “Ache of Victory,” slow burns through heartbreak. Stark piano, electronic clicks and whirs, an occasional lonely cello or harp provide a pedestal for Zsela’s vocals — sometimes recalling Sade at her coolest, other times layered and treated like Thom Yorke doing some kind of gospel/ soul/torch song hybrid.
“Ache of Victory” came together over a long three years with producer Daniel Aged. Neither of them rushed the project (even though they had no label money behind it), and that patience can be felt on the EP.
“I had never had a session before with a complete stranger and that’s what we were when we met at his home studio,” Zsela said. “But the first day we met we worked on a song that I still like. … Because we took our time with this we could figure out what kind of world we wanted to build for the songs. It was just really fun and we loved being around each other, which is how it had to be because there wasn’t any budget around this and we had to work on it from beginning to mixing.”
The release only includes five songs, but it’s an emotional workout.
It starts with a skeletal piano and Zsela’s thin, wounded voice singing, “Wine on the carpet/ Wait till you find it/I don’t have the strength to hide it” on “Drinking.” The crush of the song, a lost soul relapsing and falling, begins a tumble that ends with a choir of Zselas overdubbed and chanting, “If I were to tell you the faces I put on/The grins and sins and innocence/ Would you run with me?” over the low-end rumble of an organ on “Undone.”
“I had a really guttural response to starting with ‘Drinking,’ it set the tone for this EP,” she said. “‘Undone’ was also a gut response and it was the very last thing we did before sending the EP to be mastered. The song closed the time for me. The EP is a time capsule of my life. … Only now do I realize why I needed to end with ‘Undone.’ The song is about letting go, about sitting with your chaos and moving on too.”
Zsela hopes moving on means more music, maybe an album made at a faster pace with Aged. But she knows how successful working slowly has been.
“I am trying to take advantage of this time and Daniel is too, and we have both been quarantining so we are trying to get together,” she said. “I have a lot of material but I’m not sure where it’s at. I need to take it slow.”