Katzin

Born in Alexandria, Virginia and raised across Pasadena, North Carolina, and Manhattan, Zion Battle brings a lifetime of restless movement to his debut album as Katzin, Buckaroo — a charged portrait of the passage from adolescence to adulthood. Shaped by the coffeehouse radio of his early childhood, the electric thrill of discovering Nirvana and Springsteen, and the storytelling economy of Nebraska, Battle spent the summer after high school in the California desert with collaborator and producer Max Morgen, recording in the heat of Joshua Tree by design. Drawing on the mythologized imagery of the American West — cowboys, horses, vast plains and ancient rock — Buckaroo moves between fact and fable, pulling from real feelings and half-remembered fragments of childhood to ask what it means to be American in this particular moment. Elegiac and smoldering with hope, it's less a debut than a time capsule. "It's a recording of a moment in adolescence as much as it's a musical recording," says Battle. "I really think in 30 years I'll look back on it and maybe cry."