Beck Zegans has lived in Ridgewood for seven years, playing guitar in Palehound and writing her own songs on the side, the kind that kept their distance. Engraving of Armor, her debut solo LP on Exploding in Sound, is where she drops the distance.
The drum on I Want You was tracked slow and then sped back up, so it lands a fraction off from anything a person would play, machine-like and faintly uncanny. Zegans lets the verses simmer over it, holding back, and then the chorus detonates into something far noisier and bolder than what came before. Warm, raspy vocals knotted into fuzz guitars. Beautiful and heavy in the same breath, and that combination is hard to fake.
That pulse is how the whole record was built. Each of the nine songs started as a home demo, guitar and voice over a drum loop, and the mechanical heartbeat under everything never lets up. Writing to loops was new for Zegans, and you can hear her learning what the constraint does, the way it holds time steady while the guitars distort and the feeling underneath refuses to stay still.
The frankness is the thing. It came out of the pandemic, when she got angrier and started reaching for angrier music and decided to quit hiding inside metaphor. She wanted, in her words, to be “pretty frank,” and she is, all over this. The older material hid more. Now she just says it. The wanting, the urge to bolt the second something good shows up. That bluntness is what makes the record land, cathartic without once softening its own edges.
The city is everywhere in these songs. Rivers of beautiful trash, in her phrase, where everyone keeps hiding from what they want too badly, which is New York’s whole trick, enough distraction on hand to keep the want at arm’s length. She never turns on it, though. She loves the place the worn-out way you love something that keeps flattening you.
When You Were In My Bed opens almost as a chant, hushed and a little haunted, then gathers the drums and guitars into a full crescendo before peeling everything back to that bare opening for the final chorus. A deliberate first move. The armour coming off here, not going back on.
Love in the End Times she calls a love song with a bit of apocalypse in it, and it earns the description. Wide open, shimmering, a synth bubbling just beneath to give it that lit-from-below glow. The vocal carries real despair and still won’t let go of the one thread keeping it afloat. The chorus opens something instead of closing it.
On Riddle, the synth that only murmured under Love in the End Times finally breaks the surface, three minutes that won’t sit still, scattered into a kaleidoscopic swirl. El Kempner of Palehound plays lead, and the track is restless and unsettled the whole way through. Kempner comes back for Woods, which starts with Zegans finding a way out of the fog and climbs through layered riffs toward something like weight lifting off. Then the guitars at the end turn dissonant and stay there. That noise is the internal kind, the sort that won’t resolve, and the song is honest enough to leave it sitting unresolved.
A year went into it, three sets of hands. Zegans brought the demos to Alex MacKay (Cutouts, Nation of Language) for bass and synths, then Julian Fader (Remember Sports, Ava Luna) tracked drums. All three share the production credit, and they worked song by song, pulling each one apart and rebuilding it as its own contained world rather than a slot in a sequence.
Zegans never hands you the tidy resolution. She sits inside the tension and lets the contradictions stand, the wanting tangled up with the urge to run from it, and the music does the same, steady drums underneath guitars coming apart on top. This is the rare debut that already sounds like someone who knows exactly what she’s doing. The drums hold their line to the end. Somewhere over the top of them, the armour comes off, and she leaves it where it falls.
Engraving of Armor is out now via Exploding in Sound Records.
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