DISTANT LANDS | MUSIC CASSETTE

zzzahara, zzzahara's latest album came to them in a dream. Despite being born and raised in Los Angeles, Zahara had never really gotten into David Lynch. When he died at the start of 2025, they dove into his archive of films and interviews. "He's so weird," they laugh. "Always talking about how 'everything's a dream!' And you know what? At that moment, I couldn't remember the last time I dreamed. I thought, that's f***ed up. So I started taking magnesium and shit, trying to see what it was like to dream again." The dreams that followed were heavy and strange. In one of them, zzzahara was a teenager drifting through space, talking with their brother, who passed away when they were 12. "He was asking, like, do you remember me? It really f***ed me up." Their fourth album Distant Lands grew from the idea of communing with their brother-"talking to him about all aspects of my life across a long period of time." The title reflects the sense that they now exist in different worlds, touching from afar, as well as the disconnected headspace zzzahara experienced during opioid use in their early twenties. "I would often feel like I was in a different world, a dream world, blacked out and trying to connect to something that's not there." Until now, zzzahara's songwriting has largely centred on their love life. Distant Lands marks a shift. The dream about their brother encouraged them to dig deeper and zoom out, writing beyond their usual themes of sex and romance. Instead, they explored long-standing feelings about family and their experiences with addiction. In recent years zzzahara has immersed themselves in other people's fictional worlds rather than stewing in their own feelings. Their deep consumption of films and books began shaping their songwriting on Spiral Your Way Out, where writers like Charles Bukowski and Joan Didion influenced it's themes of reclaiming agency after a relationship that pushed them to become someone else. Distant Lands draws more from Wong Kar Wai's films and their flawed characters and restless longing, as well as literature that embraces uncertainty, particularly the work of Milan Kundera. zzzahara describes this self-driven cultural education as something that has helped bring perspective and stability without dulling their wild streak. "With this record I thought, what can I say about my life that's authentic without it being 'woe is me'? So that's how I wrote the songs. Let me tell it like the facts," they say. "My whole life I've always been so f***ing sad, and at some point you get addicted to the sadness. You get addicted to people treating you like shit. You get addicted to the feeling of hurting. Now I've reached a place where I'm like, nah, dude. I think I'd rather not." Staking a flag in the ground for living truthfully - and that not necessarily meaning perfectly - Distant Lands is laced with the stoic acceptance of life's currents, positive and negative. There's no bullshit to be found here - no solipsism, and certainly no regrets. "As long as you're young and you still have energy then you should do things you love, because you never know," they say. "You gotta just put your whip to the sky and f***ing crack it.