It’s a hypnotic trance with Zola Blood’s debut album, Infinite Games

Tammie
May 30, 2017
2 min read

Band: Zola Blood

Album: Infinite Games

Genre: Electronic

‘Hypnotic’ and ‘sensual’ are two perfect adjectives to describe the debut album, Infinite Games, from British band, Zola Blood, which was released on 26 May via Pond Life, an independent music label.

Indieshuffle, an online music discovery website, has compared Zola Blood to fellow Brits, Muse, mainstays of alternative and progressive rock, who hail from Teignmouth, Devon, England. Other than sharing the same country of origin, the two bands are miles apart. Zola Blood are native Londoners and they sound more like electronic duo, TENDER, who are coincidentally from London too. Zola Blood has a rather low profile from what I can search online. There’s almost nothing on the album’s release, except for selected interviews given to obscure music e-magazines, but none in the big boys like Pitchfork or Rolling Stone (not that surprising, if you think about it).

The album opens in a pulsing tempo in the titular opening track and Heartbeat, before transiting to mellower pieces like Nothing and Islands. In the latter, frontman, Matt West, softly croons about relationships that are isolated from the world, relying heavily on seascapes (“Rip currents surround me / To the rhythm of our melody / It's carving out our ship / As at the waves are coming in”) and other metaphors relating to nature (“A steady hand to calm the sand / And divide us / Birds song / Fading on”).

Here’s what West had to say about Islands:

"A friend of mine was telling me about an evening she spent with her boyfriend at the time, getting rained on all night in a tent and said in passing that they felt like an island.

"That imagery just stuck in my head. The track is about drifting off with someone, forgetting who you are or where you're supposed to be."*

I would say that pretty much sums up the album. Each track has an immersive quality to it, inviting you in with dreamlike cadences. The lyrics are poetic; filled with rich symbolisms of relationships and a person at a loss, although the two are sometimes one and the same. The tracklist of 10 flows seamlessly, with one song seemingly cognizant of the subsequent one, before ending on a melancholic, introspective piece with Get Light, (“Say your so longs / Let it dissolve and pass the time / Just keep it light”)* that resonates long after it has ended, leaving you yearning for more.

One thing I know for sure - Infinite Games is an antidote for heartbreaks, together with a long novel, hot coffee, and a rainy afternoon spent indoors. I strongly recommend listening to the album in its entirety but standouts include Heartbeat, The Only Thing, and Islands.

*Sources: DIY Mag, Earmilk, God Is In The TV Zine and Independent

Listen to the entire album on Spotify below.