Beck Zegans – Engraving of Armor

Beck Zegans used to call herself Goo. Under that name she made Squid Ink Sky, a record of lush, hallucinatory folk where organ and pedal steel wrapped around melodies that felt suspended in thick air. That album was 2023 and it deserved a longer life. But Engraving of Armor, her first release under her own name, moves in a very different direction. The dreaminess hasn’t vanished, but it now operates in harsher light. The arrangements are pricklier, the emotional register more combative.

Zegans has said the writing came from an angrier period spent listening to louder music. You can hear that in the way opener “When You Were in My Bed” starts as a gentle drone and then slowly coagulates into a chaotic krautrock rip, guitars snarling around the edges of her voice. She sings about a sleeping figure, “a dragon with folded wings,” and the tenderness of the image keeps colliding with the noise that eventually swallows it.

Throughout the record, Zegans works with a small group—Alex MacKay and Julian Fader—and together they pull the songs into stranger zones. “Record Tamer” hits a rhythmic pocket that briefly evokes Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” but feels sparser, more brittle. “Slither” struts along with a casual menace before caving to a swarm of guitars as Zegans notes the distance between desire and control. There are moments that lean into immediate melody, like the jangling “Love in the End Times,” but an ominous current tugs at the edges of every hook.

The album closes with “Armor (Susan’s Poem),” a gentle elegy that cautions against sealing yourself off. Zegans sings, “Only a suit of war remains,” and the line lands differently after the turbulent noise-rock climax of “Woods.” By then it’s clear that Engraving of Armor isn’t about hiding behind noise. It’s about letting the pressure build until something breaks open. The album is out now via Exploding in Sound.