Zuzu - Queensway Tunnel (2021)

Liverpool's acclaimed singer-songwriter and noted sci-fi obsessive, gamer, and comic book enthusiast - returns with her first full release since blazing a trail with 2020's major label EP release How It Feels. With that EP being released just as the UK entered its first lockdown, the skies in Zuzu's universe could have started to look a little darker. However, the stars look to be aligning once more, after what many might see as having been a productive 12 months.

Debut album Queensway Tunnel draws its power from themes of change, addiction, sci-fi, escapism, identity, community, and the protection of mental health. Through her sincerity, intimacy and rawness, Zuzu continues to catalogue what she describes as a "deep emotional unrest", striving to arrange, sort and file how she feels through her music - defragging a cluttered and chaotic headspace, to figure out what it means to navigate life as a twenty-something.

With Queensway Tunnel, the trappings of the pandemic inspired a re-focusing on what was in front of her all along. If each song forms a connective tissue between memories, people and places, then the album's beating heart is a picture of Merseyside, an area with an iconic musical history, and strong identity all of its own. Zuzu has often spoken about being told to leave her accent out of her music, so there seems no truer way to throw that advice back than to write an album expressly about where she is from, connection, relationships, time and place, what the city gives, and what the city takes.