23 year-old, Detroit-based singer/songwriter Chloe Drallos is the creative mastermind behind the rising pop recording project Zilched. Started back in 2017, Drallos exploded into the national scene with her full-length debut, 2020’s DOOMPOP, an effort, which saw the Detroit-based artist quickly establishing an eclectic, genre-defying take on pop.
Drallos’ highly-anticipated sophomore album, the Ian Ruhala and Ben Collins co-produced Earthly Delights is slated for release next Friday through Young Heavy Souls. Earthly Delights is reportedly a testament to the maturation of her uncompromising creative vision that sees the Detroit-based artist adding elements of grunge to her gothic pop-tinged take on art rock. Lyrically, the material is a dazzling display of poetic lyricism that sees Drallos weaving an intricate tapestry of Romantic imagery, metaphor and religious allegory among other things, that manages to soften the blow of her brutal, unflinching honesty. Thematically, the album explores the purgatorial nature of bargaining with an indecisive lover and simultaneously with oneself.
Last month, I wrote about album single “Loveless,” a song that oscillates between shimmering and yearning Kate Bush-like verses and cathartic, rousingly anthemic choruses as the song’s narrator speaks of something that’s fairly universal: the frustration and annoyance of a lover that’s been withholding and indecisive. The song ends with its narrator essentially saying “make up your mind or I’ll make it up for you.” While “Loveless” is a display of slick and seemingly effortless craft, the song feels rooted in bitter, deeply lived-in experience.
“The song is like a conversation between lovers. Contemplating the purgatorial roller coaster that exists between freedom and unity,” Drallos says.
Earthly Delights‘ third and latest single, album title track “Earthly Delights” derives its name after the Northern Renaissance triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. Built around buzzing guitars and synths, thunderous drumming, layers of vocal harmonies paired with rousing anthemic hooks, the shoegazey “Earthly Delights” is a redemptive narrative that takes place in three perspectival realms — and on in which Drallos finds celebration amidst seclusion and suffering.
“‘Earthly Delights’ is about reclaiming your sacred space in romance and realizing the space you’re sharing feels very wrong. When Eden feels like purgatory.” Drallos continues, “I was fed up with loneliness but didn’t want my solitude taken. I felt as though I needed to reclaim what I deem sacred.”
Fittingly, a song that reminds me so much of 120 Minutes era MTV alt rock, has a hazy, kaleidoscopic, 120 Minutes-like visual.