Hailing from New York, Gabriel Zucker is a songwriter, composer, pianist, and multi-instrumentalist whose work combines maximalist compositions, intimate songwriting, virtuosic metric complexity, innovative production, and progressive improvisation.  Zucker performs regularly in a series of distinctive solo and duo arrangements, doubling on piano, synthesizer, and voice, accompanied by collaborators on drums, including Budapest-based Attila Gyárfás, with whom Zucker has performed repeatedly across Europe in recent years. Their performances are notable for their virtuosity, range, drama, and organic development, with the duo effortlessly navigating between complex compositions and open-ended sound worlds.

Years in the making, Gabriel Zucker’s sixth studio record, Confession (Boomslang Records) comes out November 21. Alternately ethereal and bombastic, electronic and acoustic, vocal and instrumental, Confession is a deeply human reflection on what it means to know another person.  Zucker is sharing one of the songs coming from the new album today, “Confession #2.” Throughout the track, the lyrics and instrumentals play off each other; both are teetering between chaos and lucidity.

Confession is the product of six years of work, beginning with musical ideas from 2018 and 2019, that Zucker relentlessly and obsessively developed during months of isolation in the desert of New Mexico at the height of the pandemic, finishing a 75-minute draft on New Year’s Eve 2021. He returned to his native New York a few months later with the nearly-unperformable demos, and spent two years experimenting with different arrangements — including a virtuoso duo realization with Budapest-based drummer Attila Grárfás, parts of which were released on the 2022 live studio record Cities And Deserts. After two years of painstakingly assembling the right ensemble to represent the music, Confession was primarily recorded in two days in Brooklyn in spring 2023. Zucker extensively overdubbed and re-worked the tracks continuously over the following two years — a period in which, as a social activist and public policy expert alongside a musician, Zucker was simultaneously working up to 60 hours a week on Biden administration-era efforts to build a more equitable and progressive U.S. tax system.

With Confession, Zucker establishes himself as the consummate 21st-century composer, bringing high-level craft, subtlety, and discipline of classical composition to a record rooted in New York’s improvised music scene that can still scan as an indie rock record. Few artists are creating the kinds of thorough, unified compositional studio statements that Confession represents.

Far beyond a concept album, Confession is a single, unified through-composed art rock record. Various themes are woven together across twelve movements, arranged into four continuous sections, each lasting about 15 minutes, and each representing their own miniature, cinematic journeys. Each showcases too Zucker’s signature treatment of rhythm and meter, which builds masterfully on influences in early-aughts mixed-meter creative music.

Photo Courtesy: Dennis Christians