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Zoh Amba Pushes Further Into Indie Rock on “Eyes Full”
Zoh Amba’s title track “Eyes Full” deepens the Tennessee artist’s turn from avant-jazz saxophone to twang-forward indie rock, pairing sharp vocals with tangled guitars and a restless rhythm section ahead of the Matador LP.
Tennessee-born Zoh Amba first built a reputation as a saxophonist in New York’s avant-jazz circles, but Eyes Full signals a deliberate shift in form and language. The upcoming record moves toward twang-heavy, countrified indie rock, and the title track makes that pivot feel less like a detour and more like a new center of gravity.
Recorded in Asheville with Kevin Hyland on electric guitar and Jim White on drums, “Eyes Full” is driven by tension rather than polish. Amba’s vocal tone carries a high, cutting twang that stays front and center while the guitars knot and unspool around it. There’s a jagged, interlocking quality to the arrangement that recalls Sonic Youth at their most tensile, but the song doesn’t read as revivalism; it feels lived-in and specific to Amba’s current trajectory.
The track follows lead single “Another Time,” which already suggested this direction with confidence. If that song introduced the palette, “Eyes Full” expands it, emphasizing how comfortably Amba inhabits this hybrid of roots texture and noisy indie structure.
The video, directed by Grace Bader Conrad, arrives as Amba continues to widen the frame around their work. Eyes Full is due June 5 via Matador, and based on the two singles so far, the album’s significance may lie in how naturally it collapses boundaries between scenes that are usually kept separate.
