In April, Zoh Amba announced their Matador debut album Eyes Full, out June 5th, an album of tough and soulful songs that feel like a pure transmission from the heart. Today, Amba shares the album’s pensive and darkly hypnotic title track, a song about what makes someone’s heart full, and questioning why. It’s accompanied by a video directed by Grace Bader Conrad, featuring Amba and album musicians Jim White (drums) and Kevin Hyland (electric guitar).

‘Eyes Full’ follows first single ‘Another Time’, on which The Guardian said, “the free jazz saxophonist turns equally remarkable songwriter for a record that twists their Appalachian roots with openhearted, choppy indie rock”, and Stereogum in their Best 5 Songs of the Week noted, “that voice, along with those lyrics about being lost and seeking transcendence, make for pure beauty, rustic country-rock style.”

Alongside a recent sold out headline show at New York’s Nightclub 101 previewing songs from the new album, Amba performed in Coachella as part of Iggy Pop’s band. They will tour the US throughout the summer supporting Courtney Barnett and Folk Bitch Trio. A full list of tour dates is below.

Eyes Full is distinctly, instinctively tied to Zoh’s hometown of Kingsport, Tennessee and the rediscovery of their first instrument, the guitar. The album courses with a type of muddy, loose acoustic blues, punctuated with bursts of feedback-laden electric guitar and sweet burnishes of Appalachian folk. It’s a remarkable turn for an artist who has already become one of the most exciting saxophonists to emerge from NYC’s avant-garde scene,

In music, Amba is always striving for greater proximity to the divine. On Eyes Full, they’ve never come closer. Every song circles the idea of seeing and being seen. The record looks closely at the lives of working-class folk in small towns who bust their asses off while trying to find any salvation they can. “I hope these songs touch people’s hearts,” Amba says. “They’re about people who really need to be seen and heard.”

For years, Amba tried to find an identity outside of where they came from. Raised in the mountain towns of Tennessee, they left at seventeen for San Francisco, then moved to New York City soon after. Yet no matter how far they traveled, home always wrapped itself around their ankle. “When you try to run from something it ends up catching up to you,” they say now, speaking in a thick Southern drawl they no longer attempt to hide. “And you have to deal with it.”

Though Amba had long believed that pure instrumental music could help souls, and that transcendence could be reached without language, words eventually pushed their way in. While playing saxophone, they often felt as though they were being carried heavenward: their body burning, tears rising, the music opening a direct line to God. But alongside that ecstasy came flashes of darker childhood memories. The guitar became a way to face those visions directly, to hold them at eye level rather than flee. They sang their way through it, and back to Kingsport.

Growing up, Amba watched their small town pass through a difficult, destabilizing period. For a time, they tried to keep that reality at arm’s length, only later recognizing how thin the line was between themselves and those who suffered most. They grew a greater sense of grace and understanding for these people. Each song on Eyes Full, which is entirely character-driven — from the kid benumbed by medication (‘OCD’) to the weed-eating man who plays hide-and-seek with God (‘Weed Eating’) — is an act of love for them. “They all deserve to go to heaven,” says Amba, rejecting the punitive theology that surrounded them in the Bible Belt. Songs about damnation never made sense to them; what interested them instead was mercy, and the possibility of redemption.

The record was tracked live at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, an hour from Amba’s hometown, with no overdubs. Their best friend Kevin Hyland plays electric guitar, while drummer Jim White, whom Amba met on the streets of New York years earlier and now calls the closest thing they’ve had to a family, plays drums. The three musicians rehearsed relentlessly, playing together all day, every day, “until we got real tight,” says Amba. White and Amba play interlocked, while Amba and Hyland weave around one another, Amba playing rhythm and Hyland playing lead; currents of life running alongside one another.

The music itself sounds moonshine-drunk, Amba’s voice snarling and fiery, their guitar slowing then gathering speed like a steam train edging off the tracks. They veer suddenly between abrasion and gentleness. One moment they’re all teeth, the next, they go soft and still. On ‘Emahoy,’ they play a drowsy and velveted guitar line while singing with unguarded tenderness about the sadness dancing in their soul.

Standout ‘Southern Soil’ is the song with the most stakes, its eyes the most difficult for Amba to look into. “When that song finally came to me, I w

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