“I was a really shy kid, but the people who knew me knew I wasn’t really shy,” Zsela tells me from across a coffee table on the final day of May.
She’s just arrived at The FADER office, decked out in denim, hair in long, golden braids. She seems relaxed, considering her debut album is due out two weeks later.
In the context of current industry pressures, Zsela (29) has been relatively slow to arrive at her first full-length. Big For You comes five years after her debut single, “Noise,” and four years after her debut EP, Ache of Victory.
Aside from that project’s 2021 remix tape, she’s been quiet in the interim. Her meticulousness betrays a note of perfectionism, but not the type of anxiety-riddled nitpickery the term connotes. “It took the time it took,” she says, “and I’m glad, because where we landed with everything feels like the best version.” Read Next: New Music Friday: Listen to new projects from skaiwater, Zsela, Martha Skye Murphy, and more.
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