ZOH AMBA - Eyes Full

For a girl who grew up listening to the Stooges' album “Fun House”, getting to play saxophone in Iggy Pop's band over two weekends at Coachella is far more than a milestone: for Zoh Amba, it's just the beginning. The 26-year-old from Tennessee has plenty more weapons up her sleeve. With a debut produced by John Zorn and a sax talent that has earned her lofty comparisons to Albert Ayler, the artist has developed a wide-ranging curiosity. That drive led her to leave the San Francisco Conservatory to immerse herself in the American underground, moving from jazz avant-garde circles all the way to crossing paths with Steve Gunn and Jim White, her fellow travelers alongside Shahzad Ismaily in the jazz-rock project Beings.
Zoh Amba has consistently felt the need to pair the carnal, guttural shriek of her sax with the visceral scrape of guitar, an instrument that made a shy appearance on 2025's “Sun” before becoming the absolute protagonist of a powerful, innovative record, “Eyes Full”, which marks a creative turning point for the American artist. 

Recorded largely live in a North Carolina studio alongside Jim White and Kevin Hyland, this fourth chapter is a rough short-circuit between Appalachian folk, blues, slacker country and grunge. A perfect blend of carefully considered harmonic structures and free-form looseness. The first bare-bones notes of “OCD” instantly revive Michelle Shocked's raw folk poetics and the energy of Nirvana's “Mtv Unplugged In New York”, and that's just the start. It'll be impossible not to count the gorgeous “Southern Soil” among the songs of the year: a harsh yet sincere conversation with her parents, grappling with major personal struggles (her father is in prison for drug use and dealing), where voice and strings merge into a desperate cry of pain.
It's no accident that the next step is the furious title track. Zoh Amba doesn't do compromise, and she aims straight for the heart, backed by a guitar technique as visceral as her approach to the sax (kept in its case for now). The songs on “Eyes Full” never linger in any potential comfort zone: even the more empathetic, poetic “Another Time” offers no respite, while the velvety, dark “Thousand Years” turns granite-hard with a Sonic Youth-like edge, a path already carved out by the grunge-folk charge of “Dead End Street”.

The overlap between Zoh's abrasively folk acoustic guitar style and Kevin's distorted electric guitar sounds is not just intriguing but essential to fully grasp the devastating force of the young musician's compositions. There's a visceral urgency in the noise-rock of “Odd Jobs” and a poignant poetry behind the acid folk of “Weed Eating” that carries a whiff of apocalypse. “Eyes Full” sounds like a record made by the last survivors searching for other human beings still alive; the songs reek of lived experience (“PG Tips”), of desperation (“Child You'll See”), but also of faint hope (“Smile With Your Eyes”) — a declaration of love for life, at once poetic, wild and authentic.

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03/07/2026