Engraving of Armor

Beck Zegans has spent seven years in Ridgewood playing guitar in Palehound and writing her own songs on the side, the kind that kept their distance. Her debut solo LP is where she drops it. Each of the nine songs started as a home demo, guitar and voice over a drum loop, and that mechanical heartbeat never lets up. The drum on I Want You was tracked slow and sped back up, so it lands a fraction off from anything a person would play, and Zegans lets the verses simmer over it before the chorus detonates into warm, raspy vocals knotted into fuzz guitars. Beautiful and heavy in the same breath, which is hard to fake. The frankness is the thing. It came out of the pandemic, when she got angrier, reached for angrier music and quit hiding inside metaphor. The wanting, the urge to bolt the second something good shows up. New York is everywhere in these songs, rivers of beautiful trash where everyone hides from what they want too badly, and she loves the place the worn-out way you love something that keeps flattening you. El Kempner of Palehound plays lead on Riddle and returns for Woods, which climbs through layered riffs toward something like weight lifting off before the guitars turn dissonant and stay there. She never hands you the tidy resolution. The drums hold their line to the end, the armour comes off, and she leaves it where it falls.