Zsela cements her experimental pop voice on Big For You

For Zsela Thompson, Big For You is a testament to four years of fine-tuning the mesmerizing sound she carved out on her 2020 Ache of Victory EP. This time has resulted in a debut that is a fuller, more realised vision of herself than ever. Indeed, Zsela says of the album that “all ten songs have lived many lives, and it’s been a gift growing alongside them.” And those many lives shine through each track, as we’re transported through a beautifully-orchestrated tapestry, finding the 29-year-old musician blending an eclectic mix of influences throughout.

While Zsela’s previous EP was full of slower, more sparse and melancholy compositions. Big For You has a buoyancy and lightness with varying tempo shifts throughout, fusing pop, baroque, jazz, and folk influences. Zsela’s signature, warm and smoky contralto voice is just as arresting as ever here, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Joan Armatrading, especially on “Not Your Angel” which seamlessly fuses layers of intricate vocals among a more experimental blend of 80s R&B, rock, and funk polyrhythms.

As with all of her work, Zsela assumes the role of producer and composer alongside Daniel Aged (Frank Ocean, FKA twigs, Yves Tumor) a collaborative relationship the two developed at the start of her career. In many ways, the production on the album is reminiscent of Bon Iver’s work in 22, A Million and in the more experimental elements from Flock of Dimes or Ben Howard records (see “Still Swing” – the synthesizers, vocal samples, and staccato guitar licks and drums seem to reference all of those influences in a completely new way).

Some of the songs eschew typical pop song templates in favour of looser, free verse and instrumental structures. Each seems more like an orchestral arrangement with overtures, crescendos, and codas – a compositional technique that first surfaced on Ache of Victory, only this time pushed further. Each song is a shapeshifting journey, so that a shorter three-minute song feels much longer (see “Watersprite,” the swelling horns and woodwinds on “Play,” or the jazzy “Moth Dance”). It's a winding listening experience that seems to stretch time, similar to a Joanna Newsom song, leaving listeners breathless as they are swept away to the next track.

Although some of the lyrics are impressionistic and fragmentary, there is a loose narrative arc to the album. The beautifully wandering overture, “Lily of the Nile,” sets up an almost Thelma and Louise-like drama only vaguely followed and referenced throughout the rest of the album. Years ago, on “Undone” the last song of her EP, Zsela sang, “Would you run with me?” Now, on Big For You, she starts with a defining image: “I hitched a ride with the bride last night / Her left hand adorn and I almost died / Thinking how we’d tower / I stepped on her bike and your grandmother cried / How my heart ran off with Lily in her eyes.” Here, the speaker runs off with a bride-to-be, perhaps to the dismay of the grandmother of the bride. Later, the anxiety of the budding relationship leaves the lovers confronting their self in the other, much like the Lynchian mirror of Zsela’s portrait on the album cover.

The tension between all of the instrumental play on the album mirrors the give and take of a relationship, echoed in songs like “Brand New,” where Zsela sings, “And I bet you got everything I wanted / I bet you wanted everything I got.” The antimetabolic reversal of these phrases here and elsewhere in the album (“I’m right between / my word and giving up” and “I’m right between the / world you’re giving up” in “Watersprite”) are evidence that Zsela’s lyricism holds up to the dynamic instrumentals on each track. Both “Lily of the Nile” and “Easy St.” contain spoken word poems (“Easy St.” is, in its entirety, spoken over jazzy, electric guitar doodles) which are a welcome breath among the denser compositions. They also bookend bits of the narrative arc nicely, adding more to the story, urging the listener to dive back in to uncover these lovers’ enigmatic story.

On “Not Your Angel,” Zsela reiterates: “I wanna meet you over and over and over again / ‘Cause there’s so many yous in you / And I can’t get used to it.” Those words seem to speak to the construction of the songs themselves - intricately layered, full of shapeshifting vocal melodies and swelling synths, electric guitars, horns and strings…so many “yous” – much like the many facets of a musician whose debut leaves us spirited away, wanting to go back to the start, again and again, to hear it anew.