For a girl who grew up listening to the Stooges album “Fun House”, being able to play the saxophone in Iggy Pop's band during two weekends at Coachella is more than an achievement: for Zoh Amba it's just the beginning. The twenty-six year old from Tennessee has many other weapons to show off. With a debut produced by John Zorn and a talent on the sax that has earned her illustrious comparisons with Albert Ayler, the artist has developed a transversal curiosity. This drive led her to abandon the San Francisco Conservatory to immerse herself inunderground American, moving from the jazz avant-garde to intercepting Steve Gunn and Jim White, his adventure companions together with Shahzad Ismaily in the jazz-rock project Beings.
Zoh Amba has constantly felt the need to combine the carnal and guttural screech of his sax with the visceral scratch of the guitar, an instrument that made its timid appearance in the 2025 album “Sun”, and then became the absolute protagonist of a powerful and innovative album, “Eyes Full”, which represents a creative turning point for the American artist.
Recorded largely live in a North Carolina studio together with Jim White and Kevin Hyland, this fourth chapter is a rough short circuit between Appalachian folk, blues, slacker country and grunge. A perfect amalgam of reasoned harmonious structures and listlessness free-form. The first essential notes of “OCD” resurrect in an instant the rough folk poetics of Michelle Shocked and the Nirvana energy of “Mtv Unplugged In New York”, and it's just the beginning. It will be impossible not to include the splendid “Southern Soil” among the songs of the year: a harsh but sincere dialogue with the parents, grappling with great personal dilemmas (the father is in prison for drug consumption and dealing), where voice and strings blend in a desperate cry of pain.
Let the next step be rabies title track it's not a coincidence. Zoh Amba doesn't like compromises and aims straight for the heart, thanks to a guitar technique as visceral as his approach to the sax (for now remaining in the case). The songs on “Eyes Full” never linger on potential comfort zones: even the most empathetic and poetic “Another Time” gives no respite, while the velvety and dark “Thousand Years” becomes granitic with a Sonic Youth-like edge, a trail already traced by the grunge-folk ride of “Dead End Street”.
The overlap between the abruptly folk style of Zoh's acoustic guitar and the distorted sounds of Kevin's electric guitar is not only intriguing but fundamental to fully grasp the devastating force of the young musician's compositions. There is a visceral urgency in the noise-rock of “Odd Jobs” and a poignant poetry behind the acid folk of “Weed Eating” that smells of apocalypse. “Eyes Full” sounds like a record recorded by the last survivors in search of other human beings still alive, the songs smack of experience (“PG Tips”), of desperation (“Child You'll See”), but also of faint hope (“Smile WITH Your Eyes”), a declaration of love for life, as poetic as it is wild, authentic.
03/07/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
