The Zolas

From of the far-flung shores of British Columbia and two decades late for the
cover of Select Magazine, The Zolas prove with Come Back to Life that you can
take a step back to move forward.

“In our jam space we started fucking around with this nostalgic vibe: like a warped
memory of the Britpop music we obsessed over as kids but never got to make.
Eventually it seemed obvious we had to follow that feeling and make an album of
it. I had just come off a long period of writing pop music for other people
[including ‘L.A. Hallucinations’ from Carly Rae Jepsen’s critically acclaimed
album Emotion] and a co-writing trip in Europe [with artists such as Starsailor’s
James Walsh] and it was a spiritual thing to be in a dank room playing loud with
our band again.”
Several years since the release of 2016’s radio-smashing, Juno-nominated
breakthrough Swooner, the group was ready to start a new cycle and a new
direction. “We thought it was hilarious to make a Britpop record at a time when
nobody but us is listening to that,” Gray muses. “but we have our little clique and
that made us more excited to do what we want and say fuck it to how it might be
received.”

The frontman describes Come Back to Life as a collision between the soundtracks
for Danny Boyle’s culture-jamming Trainspotting and Baz Luhrmann’s radical re-
imagining of Romeo + Juliet. “This is the 21st century heir to those soundtracks,”
he declares. But for all the swaggeringly self-confident vocals and soaring
wonderwall guitars on epics like “Yung Dicaprio” and “Miles Away”, the Zolas
aimed for more than carbon copying a classic sound.

“There’s so many sounds we love that came out of the mid-90s UK; britpop and
acid-house and trip-hop all carrying on in parallel scenes. If felt right to cross-
pollinate this album with all of that,” Gray says. “So we’d write simple songs in
our jam space and then steal sounds from the Prodigy or Primal Scream or the
Happy Mondays or Tricky whenever it felt good.”


While Come Back to Life is an unrepentantly joyful sonic love letter to a magical
time, the Zolas aren’t afraid to get serious on the lyrical side of things.

“Honestly every album I’ve ever written is about nostalgia and the apocalypse and
this one’s no different” Gray laughs, “but looking at it now these songs feel really
specific to our moment in time. It’s a cross-section of conversations I’ve had and
overheard in these past few years. Conversations we’ve all been a part of whether
we like it or not.”

Come Back to Life touches on everything from waking up to Canada’s appalling
treatment of its First Nations (“Wreck Beach/Totem Park”) to global wealth
disparity (“I Feel the Transition”) to artists being priced out of the cities they’ve
helped make great (“Bombs Away”).

Gray is at his most potently poignant on “PrEP”, which came out of a reddit thread
asking users to share their first-hand accounts of the ’80s AIDS epidemic. “I’ve
cried at more than a few reddit threads, but never like this. Everybody should read
this.”

“My dad [playwright John MacLachlan Gray] was in theatre, so in lots of baby
photos I’m being held by friends of his I don’t recognize,” Gray reminisces. “One
day I asked him about them, and it turns out every one of them are gone. They
were probably gone within five years of the pictures being taken. Now by some
miracle HIV is totally manageable and it pisses me off that we’re not all out there
celebrating the light at the end of such a long, dark tunnel.”

Consider, then, Come Back to Life being inspired by the past on multiple levels,
quite rightly making the Zolas thrilled about the band’s future.

“I’m dead happy just being in this band right now. We love making noise together,
we’re chasing the same vision, and lyrically I’ve never felt more on it,” Gray says
with a brashness straight from the bucket-hatted heyday of Britpop. “It’s nice to
have a Kanye moment where you look at your output and go ‘This is the greatest
shit that’s coming out this year.’ As cute Canadians we tend to shy away from
feeling ourselves like that but it’s the truth.”Swooner marks a major departure from both the cabaret rock of 2009’s Tic Toc Tic and the atmospheric minimalism of Ancient Mars. This time around the band dove headlong into vibrant, experimental pop, stirring modern production into the influences that surrounded them as kids growing up in the ‘90s.
“This is the most ‘us’ of anything we've done,” Zach observes. “It’s fun to be in an era of music where people are ready to appreciate messed-up combinations of influences, and we had a good time pushing that.” Even just in the rhythm section you can hear these mispaired influences crop up in unexpected places. Drums that revolve from Queens of the Stone Age to Dr. Dre, bass textures evoking The Pixies or Kraftwerk. Instrumentally the album features flashes of grungy hard-panned guitars, Prince-like synth flourishes, eurodance vocal samples, watery electric pianos and arpeggiators, all of which feel shockingly comfortable in their new homes.
Swooner moves on from Ancient Mars’ lost love and nostalgia into a cross-section of conversations between a generation of friends about life in 2015; the balancing act we all reckon with between fun and dread. “This album is about how fucked up it feels to step out for a cigarette and a quiet moment at a party, read about disease and climate catastrophe on your phone, finish your cigarette and go back in to dance,” says Zach. “Songs about pre-drinking in your apartment, party drugs in Europe, political arson, jerking off to internet porn, pure love in a group of friends, being single and how great it is, being single and how much it sucks, finally realizing what you want to fight for and then getting distracted. It's the realest, most fun album we've ever made by far.”

Swooner comes out March 4!