Zoya Zafar will have you swooning with the Sweet Talk of her new single — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
Taken from her upcoming album Some Songs, Sweet Talk is a mesmerizing dream-pop reflection on the bittersweet complexities of human connection. Zafar’s breathy vocals are adrift in a lush and ethereal shimmer of delicate guitar and electronics. The song’s hypnotic chorus captures the vulnerability of validation and obsessive fixation, despite the resulting emptiness. Sweet Talk is a song that meditates on the nature of longing and the sometimes painful reality of infatuation.
Some Songs is a long-in-the-works follow-up to 2015 EP Spaceless Craft. It is a collection of work written by Zafar in her early 20s and honed through careful performance through the years. The confidence and poise and unique voice in these songs place her in a lineage with the likes of Mazzy Star, Cat Power, Badly Drawn Boy and Nico.
Some Songs was produced and mixed by Florida native Max Helgemo in Nashville and features production by close friend Gia Margaret on several songs (Motion Sickness, To You, Clumsy, You Meant Nothing Too). The earliest stirrings of the album were recorded at Gia’s Chicago home, in the spirit of their earlier collaborations.
Much of the album, though, was recorded remotely in a sign of the times, with Zafar and Helgemo sending demos and song arrangements back and forth. The duo originally met in 2019 when playing a backyard show together in Gainesville; they reconnected a year later during the worst of the pandemic and decided to remotely collaborate on the album. The creative kinship was immediate.
Some Songs is the culmination of years of work and craft for Zafar, who originally wanted to record and release it back in 2018. But life got heavy and she had a lot of grief to process. She put music aside for a while. “I put a pause on music and ended up moving across the world. I went through a very numb phase where I hardly even listened to music. Shortly after I developed an aggressive auto-immune disease that left me barely able to walk for three years. It also caused bone erosion in my shoulder making it difficult to play instruments.”
Indeed, the vocals for the album were recorded when Zafar was at a particularly low point: Very ill, weakened and unable to walk. The days were a blur of doctor’s visits, constantly switching out medications and endless days of isolation. Luckily, she was able to find some measure of solace in music again — at long last. Some part of revisiting these formative songs is an attempt to musically crystallize a more innocent, pre-sickness time in Zafar’s life. “Collaborating on this album felt extra special because it gave me something else to focus and look forward to and to not feel so isolated in the process.”
Some Songs is an album that kills you softly with its unhurried beauty and Zafar’s sonorous and intimate vocal whisper, before you even know your heart has broken into one million tiny but unique fragments.
Zafar, born in Pakistan but raised in Orlando, is a self-taught musician and singer who has been writing songs and playing out locally and around Florida since her teens, earning her a diverse fanbase across underground subcultures in the Sunshine state.
Check out Sweet Talk above, hear more from Zoya Zafar below, and find her on her website and Instagram.
