Breaking his three-year long hiatus from releasing music, Columbus-born pop-rocker and author Zac Young hits the ground running with his new single, “Summer Bender Blues (Hooray! Halloween Is Coming),” a playful tribute to the turning of seasons.
Young has spent a career in pursuit of capturing the beauty within chaos, his lyrics and writings alike juxtaposing the likes of spilled blood, benders, and guts with starlight and swans.
Harnessing this flair for dramatic poeticism yet again, he contrasts a blossoming love with the decay of summer in the form of a rock ballad, complete with macabre motifs of graveyards and Halloween costumes. Interspersed with piano, organ, and ghostly backing vocals, the song is unmistakably haunting, capturing the melancholy that ushers in as the wind turns icy and leaves begin to fall.
“The song is quite literal in how I was feeling when I wrote it in September,” Young expresses. “It was the end of summer, and there’s a romanticism when any season changes, but especially the transition into autumn. It’s my favorite time of year.”
“Summer Bender Blues (Hooray! Halloween Is Coming)” is the lead single from his upcoming album, which is slated for release next year. “All the songs for the record were inspired from a photo shoot I did with Neilson Hubbard at an old church in Georgia,” Young states. “Typically an album cover comes after everything is recorded, however, I was so moved by Neilson’s talent and vision with his photography, that I already have the cover and that’s been my canvas.”
After spending his 20s in rock/hop-hop fusion band Stereomonster, Young would publish God’s In The Water and Hoodlum Book, a novel and anthology of short stories and poems respectively. This literary theme would eventually intertwine with Young’s following musical releases, resulting in a discography colored with vivid imagery, a blend of the grim and the graceful. His debut solo album, Nocturne for the Nocturnal, was released in 2020.
A handful of singles and an EP later, this affinity for all things mysterious and morose still rings true, with “Summer Bender Blues” being no deviation from that. Young’s newest single is a sign of more uniquely crafted music to come, and fans can expect his characteristic affection for morbidity to shine through in whatever he has up his sleeve next.
