By my best measure, I first encountered Zook some time in 2018 with the release of “What’s It To You?” – a single from the then forthcoming debut album, Garden Variety. The Zook of 2018 is certainly not the Zook of 2025 but that evolution of sound is a big part of what makes Evaporating – the third full-length and first with YK – so enamoring.
To hear Zach Tittel tell it (that’s Zook), he was encountering some creative hurdles when starting in on the record. “I realized my desire to organize my thoughts was often what prevented me from making things,” he says. So, he did the exact opposite and stopped trying to organize everything. He let in the scraps and fragments of ideas and gave them a home, as scattered as they might be.
He joined Writer’s at the Water, an anti-writer’s round gathering at Nashville’s infamous Springwater Supper Club put together by John Allingham of The Cherry Blossoms. The sessions encouraged a brand new way of thinking that wasn’t about showcasing a finished thought but rather about sharing an exploration. “I’d come up with something new every week and started writing down or recording the ideas that stuck around. It was low stakes in a way that made it feel like I was starting over,” Tittel recalled. These fragments were collaged and rearranged with the intent of simply following the idea, rather than forcing it into order.
Zook consulted with his musical family – a constellation of disparate talents that includes Billy Campbell, Husam Suboh, Ryan Bigelow and Thomas Luminoso. Each contributed ideas and manipulations for these pieces to take form. The recording itself emerged from sessions at Tittel’s abode, Campbell’s Second Floor Recording and Luna Kupper’s Ivy Eat Home.
The resulting LP, Evaporating, fully embodies that spirit of exploration. These songs began as murmured melodies, half-thought lines and scattered scraps that bloomed into bursts of shimmering guitars, waves of driving percussion and vocals that float in from an ethereal realm. It’s an album that breathes in melancholy introspection and releases an outpouring of optimism.
Zook’s unstructured approach to creation manifested into an album that evokes the feeling of letting go. “Making music can momentarily satisfy the urge to transform,” Tittel says, and that sense of transformation hums beneath every track. What started as an attempt to resist stagnation became a quiet rebirth: the sound of someone rediscovering their own pulse.
It’s a far cry from the works I first heard in 2018 on Garden Variety. A refreshing reinvention and a bold evolution in songwriting across the board. What remains as a throughline is Tittel’s combination of breezy vibes, psychedelic explorations and willingness to embrace melancholy through pop songs. It’s a unique combination that Evaporating expresses beautifully.
The album is available in the YK Shop, on Bandcamp, Ampwall, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music and everywhere else you can imagine. Let yourself soak it in.
To celebrate the release, Zook will play in Nashville, TN tonight – Nov 7th, 2025 – at Soft Junk with Impediment and if i could ever realize.
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