Before the fraught gay couple Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai share a tango in Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 film Happy Together, Ho lets go of Lai until he remembers the moves. He’s stepping the wrong way—again. Ho Po-Wing retreats to the kitchen table, his back turned to his lover, as Lai awkwardly practices the steps alone—doing the grapevine in sandals, cradling the room’s musty air in his arms.
Zahara Jaime’s newest project as zzzahara, Distant Lands is Lai’s tango for one in musical form. The confessional lo-fi guitarist, also Eyedress’ bandmate in The Simps, took inspiration for their newest album partly from the “terminal state of yearning” in Wong’s cinema. Following 2025’s struggling breakup record Spiral Your Way Out, a dream involving zzzahara’s deceased brother shifted their creative process from the environs of LA skateparks toward imagined parallel universes, with endless possibilities for love and disappointment. Zzzahara also scours further back into the destructive patterns of family strife, avoidant personality, and opioid addiction that’ve weighed on more relationships than just their most recent.
Distant Lands continues to find zzzahara tuning their instrumentation around the raw, naked honesty of their voice. It treats its dour genre touchstones merely as vessels in which to send messages out to sea. Too warm for emo and cold wave, too soberingly real for shoegaze, it’s zzzahara.
Though the soundtracks of Wong movies, such as Piazzolla’s milongas over Happy Together, share a sense of longing with zzzahara’s music, it bears more in common with the choppy frame rates of their cinematography. Imperfections in the production and vocals become deliberate reflections of how it feels to exist in a world that moves faster around you than you can catch up to. zzzahara’s vocals stumble and slur over the speedy Casey Lagos drum machines of first track “Whispering Tree,” the record’s most wide-open track. Like an establishing shot, bells, shimmering guitar tones, and childish high notes stake out the entire space the record needs to work in. The idyll fills a hole left after 2016’s Beyond the Fleeting Gales, the first (and sadly only) full-length by Crying.
Within this paradise, zzzahara pleads for an unchallenging arrangement that guarantees “I would never fall for you / But you would fall for me”—the first of many cues as to why they’ve struggled to draw these distant lands any closer to them.
Zzzahara has taken more responsibility as a solo artist pressed to shape songs into an album. In a 15-questions interview from last year’s Spiral Your Way Out cycle, they copped to having not cared much about a record’s cohesion when they first started, before finding more pleasure in making a project where “everything connects.” On Distant Lands, “Wandering Eyes” and “She Doesn’t Want Me to Exist” play back-to-back like a two-part suite; ditto for following cuts “Speedracer” and “Chinese Tobacco.”
The plastic-tropical lilt of drum machines on “Wandering Eyes” cede to a crash of real drums on “She Doesn’t Want Me to Exist” about a triggering episode in which they recalled their mother’s abandonment in a date ignoring them at a bar. Bright, jangly guitar chords make the perfect foil for a lament that down to the very title I could’ve imagined being wailed on The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead. As though zzzahara’s playing the Johnny Marr to their own Morrissey, their own guitar seems to insist, “This is a you problem to sort out.”
Single “Speedracer” plays to the album’s biggest musical strengths, its ability to cut the organic into the artificial for moments of delightful ambivalence. Another trebly guitar riff combines with drum machine to form the sort of intro with which Molchat Doma became responsible for blowout sales of black hoodies and cigarettes. But the choruses thrill with real drums and revving engines in the closest zzzahara gets to truly living in the moment they’re wishcasting about. Until they find their body moving and craving to the rhythms of their dad’s alcoholism on following cut “Chinese Tobacco,” and all returns to earth.
Zzzahara is such a disarming singer because you always feel like they’re in the room with you, and you’re always game to let them air stuff out. The dreamy production of album midpoint “Butterflies,” like the waterlogged detritus of 2010’s stomp-clap anthems washed ashore, doesn’t conjure the scenery of an Australia trip: it conjures lying around in the dorm half-heartedly floating ideas for one.
The second half of the album becomes mournful, populated with places that stand out of reach and never had to exist. With shifting tempos and plunging bass, “Gardens” sounds deconstructed, hesitant on what to feel, emerging straight out of the confusion of being a kid having to grasp a sibling’s death. A CR-4 tape machine filters out all of the greenery even in their dreams. The faraway sirens trickling from “I Don’t Understand” into the start of “Andy’s Got a Gun” create very real places, the record’s first since “Chinese Tobacco,” that the singer has no escape from. On “Andy’s Got a Gun,” zzzahara’s vocals are at their clearest and most startling—”he’s pointing it at mom.”
The album does return to a bright, adventurous headspace on the closer “I Can Be Yours.” The only feature on Distant Lands sits right at the end, with zzzahara volleying sweet sentiments back and forth with Samira Winter of the eponymous dream-pop band Winter. “I Can Be Yours” trots along with similar guitar chords and tempo as zzzahara’s prior album closer “NY NY” off Spiral Your Way Out.
But where “NY NY” swam about in delirious flanging, a fading memory of lost love, the presence of Winter grounds “I Can Be Yours” in the here and now. By and large it may seem only to relapse into the “take and take” fantasies of opener “Whispering Tree,” but the warmth is undeniable and, at last, mutual. It comes from two separate sources who are both learning how to give it up. The second dancer has put their hands in the other’s hands. The tango can officially begin.
Distant Lands is out now via Lex Records. Buy or listen to the album here.
