Beck Zegans – Riddle
Beck Zegans has been rolling out the singles from Engraving of Armor at a steady pace, and “Riddle” is the third and final one before the album lands May 22 on Exploding In Sound Records. We caught the lead single “I Want You” back in W13, where the drum tempo shifts were doing real emotional work. “Riddle” goes in a different direction: slower, stranger, and on synth.
Zegans describes it as the problem child of the record. She and co-producers Alex MacKay (Nation of Language) and Julian Fader (Remember Sports, Ava Luna) kept adding to it, reworking the melody, swapping the main guitar riff for a synth version, stacking layers, then eventually tearing most of it back out. “In the end we decided to just peel most of what we did back and just let it be jarring”, she says. El Kempner of Palehound plays guitar on the track, and her contribution sits comfortably inside the groove rather than pulling focus.
What lands is the restraint. A lot of the production decisions you can hear are subtractions, not additions, and the track is better for it. The rhythm has weight, the synths stay in service of the mood rather than overwhelming it, and the odd timing gives it a quality that’s hard to place but easy to feel. I wasn’t expecting it to work as well as it does, especially given how much it apparently went through to get here.
Engraving of Armor spans nine tracks moving between fiery rock, experimental folk, and psychedelia. Zegans wrote much of it from home demos, letting guitar, vocals, and drum loops set the rhythmic foundation before building up from there. She’s described the record as deliberately direct, written after pandemic-era frustration pushed her away from metaphor and toward plain language. The album title comes from a poem by her grandmother, Susan Zegans. “Riddle” is a strong closing argument for the record.
