Zsela – Fire Excape
And our last reader pick from Juan Carlos: smoky indie with an unfortunately timely title (for real, though, we hope all of you in Southern California are safe)…

[Video]
[7.57]
Katherine St. Asaph: Maybe it’s current events that are making me hear an ominous undertone in this love song (which is silly because “Fire Excape” isn’t mythologizing LA; it’s mythologizing Brooklyn, in a way I can’t explain but is unmistakable who listened to indie-pop around 2013). Or maybe it’s the last vestiges of a pessimism I don’t use anymore. But that vibe does fill out the almost-too-spare arrangement, and makes the metallic, knifelike vocal production on Zsela’s “going down” cut more sharply.
[7]
Julian Axelrod: I can’t get enough of Zsela’s voice, which exists somewhere in the neighborhood of ANOHNI and Nilüfer Yanya but belongs to its own zip code. There’s something so powerful about a singer who always sounds like they’re about to break into a Broadway-level belt, but chooses to pull back from the brink. Whenever those synths drop in, it feels as dramatic as a final curtain call.
[8]
Leah Isobel: The soft-loud trick at the heart of “Fire Excape” is one of Zsela’s blunter tactics, and I’m not sure that it benefits from being so obvious. But it also exemplifies what I like so much about her music: it expands outward from a plain realization, articulating how it feels to know your life has permanently changed without knowing how or why or whether you will survive it. The landscape, the song-form, warps around you.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: SCHAFER: “I guess that’s why a lot of musicians blow my mind. When I listen to a song or try to make music, which has been a disaster, the only way I can think about it is to see it. Or, I see what it would look like and then I try to figure out what that sounds like.” ZSELA: “But you paint and stuff. That comes into play when you’re thinking about music, too. Sometimes I think in colors with music, but I’m not so visual. I’m very insecure about any sort of drawing and painting. I went to an alternative school, and we did a lot of our learning through art. You had to draw your textbooks, things like that. It had to be perfect, so that was a little school trauma of mine.” The drums here are wild. Gabe Wax, was that you?
[8]
Jonathan Bradley: Zsela lacks the presence to stand out in this arrangement: she sings prettily enough but is overwhelmed by thunking bass chunks and flash-lit radiation blasts of synth. In the face of such force, she’s inessential on her own song. “When day breaks on the fire escape I’m falling in love,” is a striking moment, and notably it occurs when the music drops out and Zsela sings it a cappella.
[6]
Melody Esme: Zsela’s soulful vocals combined with a minimalist alt-pop instrumental that slowly intensifies into something casually, smoothly orchestral, this gave me a taste of early Nilüfer Yanya singles like “Baby Luv” and “Golden Cage” more than anything Yanya has released since 2018. But no Yanya record has featured something as chaotic as the little fuzz-synth sting in this song’s chorus.
[8]
Ian Mathers: Genuinely, more artpop should have blasts of noise like this, or a vocal performance this good and varied, or a moment that hits as hard as “I get along quite fine, thank you.”
[9]
The synth blasts were unexpected but make the song. I wasn’t feeling it… probably a 6, but the blasts sent it to 8 for me.