Evaporating

For his third album, Zook found himself in need of reinvention. “I realized my desire to organize my thoughts was often what prevented me from making things,” he says. So he stopped organizing. He let the scraps and fragments in, half-thoughts and stray phrases found a home, incomplete ideas were welcome.

He joined Writer’s at the Water, an anti-writer’s round gathering at Nashville’s infamous Springwater Supper Club put together by John Allingham of The Cherry Blossoms. The sessions encouraged a brand new way of thinking that wasn’t about showcasing a finished thought but rather about sharing an exploration. “I’d come up with something new every week and started writing down or recording the ideas that stuck around. It was low stakes in a way that made it feel like I was starting over,” Zach Tittel (aka Zook) recalled. These fragments were collaged and rearranged with the mindset of following the idea, rather than forcing it into order.

This process of evolving fragments would inevitably involve playing the songs for friends and contorting the song’s shape into something new. Rinse and repeat. Zook’s musical family is a constellation of disparate talents that includes Billy Campbell, Husam Suboh, Ryan Bigelow and Thomas Luminoso. Each contributed ideas and manipulations for these pieces to take form. The recording itself emerged from sessions at Tittel’s abode, Campbell’s Second Floor Recording and Luna Kupper’s Ivy Eat Home.

The resulting LP, Evaporating, evokes that spirit of exploration - not in naivety, but in the wonder of creation. These songs began as murmured melodies, half-thought lines and scattered scraps that bloomed into bursts of shimmering guitars, waves of driving percussion and vocals that float in from an ethereal realm. It’s an album that breathes in melancholy introspection and releases an outpouring of optimism.

Zook’s unstructured approach to creation manifested into an album that evokes the feeling of letting go. “Making music can momentarily satisfy the urge to transform,” Tittel says, and that sense of transformation hums beneath every track. What started as an attempt to resist stagnation became a quiet rebirth: the sound of someone rediscovering their own pulse.

It’s a third album that feels like a first breath.