Premiere: ZOA learns to uphold all that ‘Wasted Time’
Alt-pop newcomer issues a reflective and heartfelt offering for her first rodeo.
When something is about to end, we can feel it. Our fingertips grow cold, pressure rising below the surface, and our hearts are cast in a wondrous and glassy iceland. It’s almost as if we, as human beings weighing our prospects in tragedy, have a sixth sense, some tremendous gift and sensitivity ⏤ forged with an ability to anticipate the burning out of a cigarette and its ash collapsing like chalk into the rainstorm. Alt-pop upstart ZOA (real name Holley Maher) twists and breaks her voice in heavy, kaleidoscopic synths with her new song “Wasted Time,” a brittle meditation on what all the erasure really means for future progress. “You taught me what love looks like when it’s over / How to feel like you’re flying high when you’re clean and sober,” she sings on the opening stanza, perhaps being honest with herself for the very first time.
And with a flourish, Maher unpacks a ripe potency that’s as much a vulnerable, searing prayer as it is a roaring battle cry. “I thought that maybe we were never-ending / Like a monument, never breaking, never bending,” she handles her tears like crystals in the golden morning light, coming closer to coping with the reality that’s now hardened and detached. “And now I know you were only pretending / I guess you were only pretending…”
“Wasted Time,” a commercially pulsating timepiece of heart, is ZOA’s debut single and sees the Nashville conspirator flex her quirkiness within a polished, mainstream framework. “I wrote this song as an experiment, as a way of putting into words something that I hadn’t allowed myself to voice yet. I was imagining the end of my relationship,” she tells B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the song today. “So, either [the song] was a premonition, or it was my psyche’s first attempt at preparing me for what I already knew was coming. In a way, this song has dramatically changed my life already. It ended my four-year relationship, sent my career in an entirely new direction and showed me that nothing we’re able to survive is really a waste of time.”
In one full swoop, ZOA’s first offering is as indebted to her pain as it is her burgeoning craft. “Wasted Time,” written one afternoon within three hours, is stamped with the kind of emotional heft that jump starts legacy pop careers. Maher has arrived and is more than equipped to turn the industry on its head.
Listen below:
