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Brooklyn’s Zula plays hypnotic, groovy pop music with a dose of noise and psychedelia. Their debut, This Hopeful, caught listeners’ attention with its personal voice and propulsive, expansive production. On Zula’s latest album, Grasshopper, out now via Inflated Records, cousins Henry and Nate Terepka craft songs with reflective, suspended moods, over a heavily rhythmic sound. Grasshopper navigates many different territories – the band foregrounds texture, but has a singer-songwriter orientation; the album pulls from dance music, post-punk and art rock, but resists stereotypes. Both funky and introspective, Zula’s music hovers invitingly for the curious listener.

The songs on Grasshopper, which were produced by Henry and Nate and mixed by Jake Aron (tUnE-yArDs, Jamie Lidell), combine wildly processed sounds with welcoming detail. Engineered by Jonathan Low (Miner Street Recordings, Philadelphia) and Kevin Harper (Warner Brothers Studios, Nashville), the longtime collaborators manipulated live band performances, adding layers and treatments. Emotive vocal harmonies were tempered with an effected, unnatural grit. The production has a re-sampled 70’s-90’s influence, informed by an acoustic guitar strumming along to a mangled James Brown loop.

Zula has built a strong reputation performing in DIY spaces across the city and country. In a live setting, the four-piece opens up their tracks, allowing them to breathe and take off on unexpected tangents. Propelled by energetic, elastic grooves, Zula is known for a polished show that sounds a little different each time.

“To listen to a Zula track is to get lost in a world of the band’s own creation — a groovy, hypnotic space in which the answers to difficult questions start to become clearer as the bass pounds against your chest and the rhythmic percussion propels you forward.”
– Consequence of Sound

“New York psych-pop explorers Zula aren’t easy to pin down, but while their sound shifts track to track, there is a beautiful coherence to an album like This Hopeful.”
– SPIN

“Pointillistic structures with a mainspring of Minimalism.”
– Jon Pareles, The New York Times