Zoé Basha - Gamble (2025) Hi-Res

Zoé Basha might be best known to some readers as one-third of the criminally underrated Dublin folk harmony group Rufous Nightjar, who, last year, released the spooky, sparkling Songs for Three Voices. It marked Basha and her colleagues out as singers and arrangers of immense talent, but with all the songs provided by Branwen Kavanagh it didn’t provide any clues about Basha’s skills as a songwriter. Gamble, her debut solo album, immediately sets that right. A collection inspired by the years she spent travelling (on foot, in vans, on freight trains), it takes in the wild highs and grief-stricken lows of a life lived to its fullest.

Basha is of American and French descent, and both of those lineages have their part to play in her music. The American side is perhaps the most obvious. The traditional Three Little Babes, with its atmospheric, droning, scraping fiddle, wears its Appalachian influences with pride but also shows a willingness to experiment. Come Find Me Lonesome has a jazzy New York street corner vibe, like a more laid-back Laura Nyro (her lyrics, with their consistently surprising word choices, also have something of Nyro about them). But the European influence is there too: Traveling Shoes flows along on a Spanish-sounding guitar, and Basha’s singing seems to take more than a sidelong glance at French chanson.

Love is Teasin’ provides the album’s tender a cappella opening, a striking introduction to her clear, unaffected voice, which sits somewhere midway between jazz and folk. It has its echo in the beautiful, dark closer, One Morning in May. The title track, with its gently plucked guitar and swaying fiddle, blossoms into a country-folk shuffle full of unexpected layers.

Warmth and richness pervade the slower-paced first half of Worries, with its evocative organ that sounds like a jazzier Garth Hudson, but Basha’s shifting, restless spirit seems to have a hand in all of her songs, and here it shows itself in the form of a surprising change of tempo, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it passage that draws on the influence of ragtime and New Orleans jazz. Sweet Papa Hurry Home leans even more heavily into ragtime (and there’s something of the catchiness of the 1930s songs of Gershwin or Porter here too), but Basha’s delivery is almost uncanny: the patina of age is all over these songs, but despite the period detail there is something about her sensibility that is disarmingly contemporary.

That contemporary urge is most fully realised in the haunting, epic experiment What Dream Is This, where song structure is treated as mere suggestion, vocals are multitracked, and studio trickery is employed to spellbinding effect. The songwriting alone makes Gamble seem almost preternaturally mature for a debut album, but when you factor in the knowledge that Basha is entirely responsible for the production too, it becomes doubly impressive.

There are moments when genres or artists of the past are expertly conjured. Same Swallows Swooping unfolds like countrified Joni Mitchell, full of vocal flights and adroit guitar work. And Basha seems to be able to pull multiple tricks at once: Dublin Street Corners is a delightful Franco-Hiberno-American conflagration of sound, with a wandering piano line and a fast and loose attitude to time signatures.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Zoé Basha’s music might be the way it manipulates its own contradictions: this is both folk music and not folk music, it is jazz but not jazz, but at no point does it feel anything other than itself, gloriously and proudly so. Gamble contains a wealth of complex emotional layers, but at its heart is the joy of making new and truly exciting music.