A recent post on social media asked about favorite albums where an artist changed their style. At first, I joked that it was Ween’s 12 Golden Country Greats, before more seriously saying Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones. But as much as those albums represented a different direction for those artists, you can see the seeds of and continuity with their earlier work.

The same can’t be said of Zoh Zamba. Her first album, 2022’s O, Sun, is an instrumental jazz record produced by avant-garde scene legend John Zorn. Earlier this year, Amba released Eyes Full, a hard-rocking singer-songwriter album that is much closer to Neil Young’s mix of ragged, punishing noise and reflective country/folk-rick. In her recent performance at the Pearl Street Warehouse, Amba and their band played it loud and burned the house down.