Forget the Beatles – there’s a new defining voice of Merseyside and it’s Zuzu (joking, but only just). This week she releases her stunning debut album Queensway Tunnel, and it’s deeply rooted in not just her own experience but in the way that where she’s from defines who she is. A profoundly personal, devastating but ultimately forward-looking listen, the title is fitting – Zuzu is looking back at all she’s been through and onwards to the light at the end of the tunnel, and Queensway Tunnel narrates the journey in painstaking, gorgeous detail. We got the chance to speak to her about what it means, and what it means to her.
“Every single song is about something that happened to me,” Zuzu explains, of what she chose to write about for her debut. “Every single song is very personal, and there’s songs on there from the worst days of my life to the happiest days of my life so as a debut it’ll be honest if nothing else. It’s a representation of what it is to be like, I was gonna say someone in their 20s but actually everyone feels like that. It’s just the reality of my life, do you know what I mean? I do want it to feel like you’ve just had a long fucking argument with your mum and dad and you’ve cried and you’ve hugged… for me that’s what it represents. Facing every fucking fear I had and coming out the end of it okay.”
The reason that Queensway Tunnel is so intimate, even more so than its subject mater is because it literally is Zuzu’s emotional diary and method of working through the situations that she’s in. “I’d just been through the ringer at the time,” she tells us. “I’ve always used music as a way to [process]. It’s funny cos I can’t do it in the moment, I have to have a couple of weeks thinking about it and then I won’t be able to write any other song until that song’s come out of me, and those are always the songs that I feel the most connected to. These are the songs that hurt the most, so I’m gonna go for them!”
Does she ever find her mind changing about situations as she writes songs about them, then? “Absolutely! 100%. Everyone’s human and you’re not always right about everything. You learn once you’ve given any situation some thought it’s really easy to have empathy for people and that’s something I definitely learnt over the course of this album was to let go of shit, embrace new shit, let things be! And that’s really easy to say now, but really hard to do in the moment so everyone really just has to be kind to themselves. Allow yourself to go through emotional stuff that you don’t like – this is gonna sound so Instagram quote, but healing isn’t a fucking linear thing, is it? I get a lot of the initial hurt off my chest when I put a song out, but it’s not a magic cure, but it does help. I would encourage anyone to do that, whether it’s painting or going for a walk with your dog, anything that helps you process overwhelming situations…”
Obviously for Zuzu, putting her heart on her sleeve in her music is a lot more vulnerable than going out with your dog, but the payoff and the catharsis when she gets out on a stage and has everyone there feeling her feelings with her is incredible. “Oh my god… nothing compares to it, nothing compares to it. It makes me want to cry even to talk about it, it means everything.” Is there anything she’s apprehensive about sharing from Queensway Tunnel, purely from an emotional standpoint? “There’s a song on there called Bevy Head. I think it’s the saddest but loads of people are like, it’s such a bop! It’s not a bop, that was the worst day of my life!”
Zuzu trusts her audience, though, and mentions her earlier song Skin and Bone as an example of letting her fans interpret things as they will. “It’s so weird. Skin and Bone is so dark and it’s mad to think like, at the end of the song I hear the crowd screaming back to me about how the rabbit doesn’t exist, and it trips me out! It’s so weird! I don’t know how they understand it, cos I would never even publicly say what that song is about so I don’t know how people take it, but I know they take it seriously. I get a lot of people messaging me about that song and they all have different things to say about it – some people wanna get down and mosh and other people are like ahhh, crying! I think Skin and Bone was a really good lesson for me in that before then, I was really nervous to do that, but since then I know there’s real strength in vulnerability and it’s good for people.”
Though the album is very much written for her, Zuzu is hyperaware of the power she wields on Queensway Tunnel, especially regarding the scouse identity that she treasures so much and that fed into the record so much. Her relationship with her fans is incredibly close, and there are a few decisions Zuzu made with them in mind, too – “when I’m scared to say something I think might be too on the nose or, oh I don’t want people to know that about me, I think I want other kids to know they’re not alone in that and I did think about that a lot. People always told me to soften up my accent, but I didn’t wanna do that, I want scouse girls to feel represented and feel like they have a voice that’s more than enough, and they have an intelligent, articulate way of speaking.”
As a songwriter, Zuzu’s voice is everything, it’s her vessel of telling her stories, and she knew she didn’t want to dull it for anything. “It’s music industry people, it’s writers, it’s also just people…” she says, when we ask who exactly is telling her to ‘soften up’ her accent. “A lot of people don’t always like scousers or the way I sing and I can’t change that, but it is up to me how I present myself and my own voice. I did make a conscious decision when I was listening back and had moments of insecurity and I was like ooh, is that word too scouse? But that’s just how I sang it though, so that’s how it should be. There were moments when I questioned, but forget other people. How do I want my fanbase who are there for me every day to feel? I want young scouse girls who are not even ten years old to feel empowered by their accent.”
Queensway Tunnel is out now.
