Zilched

MUSIC

Heavy shit Singer-songwriter Chloë Drallos taps into surf, goth, punk, and melodic pop with new Zilched LP

y e ilo Chloë Drallos is ready to talk, if you’re ready to listen. W hile som e of what the songwriter-guitarist m ight sing to you might come off caustic in its candor, there’s often a universally applicable m essage in her lyrics touting the self-em powerm ent that’s attainable when we disentangle ourselves from petty bullshit.

D rallos, a.k.a. Zilched, released an EP and a handful of singles over the last three years, but this weekend, she’s unveiling her first full-length (via Young H eavy Souls), titled D oom pop .

“A nd I picked that title m ore than a year ago, so this definitely isn’t a quaran tine album , or any kind of com m entary,” she says. To an extent, the intent is alm ost for the title to be sort of a pick-m eup. R ather than wallow in gloom and ni hilism and heaviness , D rallos has m ade an album that prom otes a sort of m ental social distancing, if you will, from the anxieties or insecurities of the comingof-age years, when we’re navigating the judgm ental whim s of cliques and cool crowds, or even our fam ilies.

“D oom pop” was a catchphrase, of sorts, that Drallos traded off with some m usicians she’d previously collaborated with, over a shared appreciation for heavier, louder, gnarlier m usic. But when it com es to the aerodynam ic blend of shoegaze and goth that’s sweetened (if not bitter-sweetened) by D rallos’ threading som e substantial earworm vocal m elodies with her signature hazy m id-range croon, then, yes — “doom plus pop” seemed to fit nicely.

But a lot of that sentim ent cam e from a conviction to work through the doom — to “face the heavy,” as she puts it, and then essentially put that heaviness behind you. T he loudness of the guitars, the litheness of the m elodies, and the propulsion of the drum s all m anifest a sense of levitating above the heavy — off-lifting the burden and digging up out of the doom .

“‘H eavy’ doesn’t have to m ean bad, or dark, in this instance,” D rallos says. A nd while som e of her form ative m usical touchstones m ay have been from the uber-subversive punk side of things, “I’m not pro-fuck the w orld ,” she says, and hopes people don’t fixate on that doom . “Because I’m still a pretty positive person, actually, or at least, that’s what I think you should put out, even if I’m not always following that,” she says. “I have put a lot of bad feelings into (the lyrics), but I feel like every song has a bit of a resolution in response to the negative, usually concluding that, ‘Yeah, that was bad, but it really doesn’t m atter in the end.’”

She adds, “T his record is just about growing pains — all of the growing pains that I actually sprang upon m yself because I was trying to grow up too fast.”

Some of us figure out who we are and what we like at an earlier age than others — and for D rallos, that inad vertently generated a lot of friction, awkwardness, and fall-outs between her and her friends. She grew up in the rural (and often conservative) m ilieus of Livingston C ounty — and when you’re a teenage girl growing up in a place like that, being essentially radicalized by Bob D ylan’s nonconform ity, enchanted by the distortion of Jesus & M ary C hain, com forted by the avant-eccentricities of D avid Lynch, and questioning organized religion? T hen, yeah … it m ight tem pt ostracization.

She was, initially, the outsider by accident. “I was always the weird one that didn’t want to be the weird one in a group of friends,” she says. “I didn’t want to actually be weird. I was just different than the people I was surrounding m yself with. I was faced with rejection, but I started to find representation in som eone like C ourtney Love. Everyone around m e loved K urt (C obain) and was like, fuck H ER … but I kinda liked her. A nd to see that you could be hated but still be great That was exciting to m e! ’C ause I did feel actually hated for a bit. T hat’s when I started to feel close to artists like (Love), and D avid Lynch with Tw in Peaks , and also John W aters and all of his stuff, which felt like it was a universe where everything that everyone else hated was norm al and celebrated, and those characters were weird, but that it was norm alized and accepted.”

She adds, “I feel like I’m a person that just invites preconceived notions. I’m used to it at this point. People presum ing that I think I’m too cool? O r people thinking I’m not cool at all? M aybe I should stop projecting … but I feel like Zilched has been m y space where I find my normal. This is my little world [where] anything that anyone else doesn’t like is exactly what makes this work.”

W orking with producer Ben C ollins (in Ypsilanti), D rallos’s voice soars to the top of the mix, despite the fiery feedback and heavy, roaring reverb underneath. O n songs like “T he M orning,” there are veritable tidal waves of cresting distortion and power chords, and it feels like a cathartic sort of cauterizing of a wound. But there is a m elody and a hook, and a beat that carries everything forward. “T he M orning,” just like several of the songs on this album , are toeing the line of ballad-territory — the pop elements are verifiably glowing beneath the m urk and the clam or, and that’s intentional.

D rallos has had som e write-ups from outlets over the last couple of years, but they’ve tended to fixate over references to either C ourtney Love or m aybe Sonic Youth, or any other quickly packaged references for fast fam iliarity to com m unicate that her m usic has sheens of atm ospheric noise and frenetic guitar phrasings, but there’s actually m uch m ore nuanced to her m usical D N A . W hile she still m ay only be in her early 20s, she’s been writing m usic for a decade now. A nd it can’t be understated that she experiences the emotions of m usic, and the em otions of songwriting in general, very intensely.

“I can tend to get wrapped up in the personal side of things,” D rallos says of her lyrics. “I’m self-taught on guitar, so I’m not as technically talented as som e — so that m eans that (Zilched m usic) is pretty m uch all m y own personal expression.”

T his is probably the key reason why D rallos has opted to keep the band’s lineup comparatively loose and fluctuating. “A t the end of the day, the sound, and everything (about Zilched) is just a mix of my favorite things. But I bet that anyone out there who doesn’t take everything as personal as I m ight probably hears this and says, O h, G od, loosen up!”

She adds, “W riting a song like ‘T he M orning’ was very therapeutic because I looked at what was going on in m y life and m y friends and asked why, why was I getting so upset about it, if, in the end, I really didn’t care. I don’t want to be like those people who are rejecting m e, anyway. So I need to not care.”

In the end, D oom pop becom es em powering because it not only encourages us to look, head on, at what’s m aking us sad, but m ore than that — asking why, whatever it m ight be, is it m aking us sad? W hy even let it? A nd how do we let go of all that heavy?

Zilched’s D oom pop is available Friday. C hloë D rallos is joined by a full band and w ill perform a livestream concert at 8 p.m . on Saturday, O ct. 24 at facebook. com /zilchedm usic. M ore inform ation is available at zilchedm usic.bandcam p. com .