Premiere: Zack Keim Shares New Single “Incredible”
New Album Battery Lane is Out February 7th via Super Sports Records
Oct 03, 2024 Photography by Ben Brady
Pittsburgh indie singer/songwriter Zack Keim has been coming into his own the past few years. After getting his start with his 2017 solo debut, First Step, Keim expanded his songwriting past his folk troubadour beginnings, releasing a series of new singles that find him moving between propulsive garage rock, jangly folk pop, and raucous, howling singalongs. He returned in 2022 with “Canyon,” and “Alice,” and followed last year with another pair of new singles, “Better Days,” and “Maggie,” all of which feature on his newly announced album, Battery Lane, due out on February 7th of next year.
Battery Lane takes its name from the street Keim lived on in the D.C. area before moving to Pittsburgh. The record loosely follows Keim’s formative years in the city, tracing the moments of heartache, yearning, and self-discovery that define early adulthood. The record also finds Keim pairing with Animal Scream and Jake Hanner on production, weaving his confessional songwriting with vibrant bursts of stomping, scuzzy energy, and lush harmonic undertones. Accompanying the news of the album, today Keim is sharing another new single, “Incredible,” premiering with Under the Radar.
With “Incredible” Keim and company deliver a marriage of kaleidoscopic folk balladry and blissed-out psych grooves, steeping the track in inviting hooks and golden-hued organic tones. The opening plaintive acoustic chords, breezy shaker rhythms, and crooned vocal melodies quickly settle into an irresistible bassline, sprawling outward before the band comes in atop earworm psych guitars and swirling keys. Late in the track, the band fully locks into the groove and rides the swaying rhythm, playing until the euphoric high begins to fade. The instrumentation steadily shifts back into the opening forlorn guitar line, closing on a final reflective moment.
These bookended acoustic moments bring out some of the heartache running underneath the lyrics, which find Keim meditating on a relationship where the spark has started to fade: “Stop foolin’ around! / I’m torn up and upside down / What do I gotta say / And what do I gotta do? / Darling, our life is bottled up and thrown away / But, why? Why we gotta give up? / Well, thought you might like to stay.”
Keim says of the track, “‘Incredible’ relates to that feeling of a relationship that’s falling off the rails—when you’re trying to hold it together for better or worse. I was listening to a lot of Clairo when I wrote it. I thought it would be cool to expand my songwriting a bit and write a pop track. In the end we added drum samples, but I wrote the original on my nylon string guitar, so it has a ‘60s Bossa Nova vibe or even crooner/Sinatra feeling to it.”
Check out the song and accompanying video directed by Anthony Peduzzi below. Battery Lane is out February 7th via Super Sports Records.
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