"Most of my life, I felt like I never really belonged anywhere," says New Jersey's J Hacha de Zola, on the phone line to talk about his latest LP, "Without a Tribe."
The record leans into dark corners of the psyche across its 32-minute running time with tracks such as "I'm High," "Drunk Again" and the title piece but the listener can easily find revolve and uplift within the LP's 10 songs.
Some of the uplift comes from the artist's singular delivery—a distillation of a sober Jim Morrison and less surreal Screamin' Jay Hawkins and some from the listener knowing that amid the darkness there are flashes of light to guide the way.
If one feels they don't belong, perhaps there's a chance they can find their tribe within the record's grooves. Hacha, a some call him, says his own lack of belonging comes from a variety of factors.
He's a first generation American, born of Peruvian parents who weren't married. His father maintained a separate family, including a wife and children. "We were just kind of the family on the side," he offers.
His father also wanted to distance himself from his own Peruvian roots, something he tried to instill in his children. "With a lot of people who are new to America," he says, "there is pressure to assimilate or disappear into American culture. My father, especially, felt this pressure to be American, to fall in."
Peru, a nation rich with culture and history, was a taboo topic. "One of the most important empires in the Americas is the Incan empire. They built so many amazing structures, they mapped the stars, they had science. I just never really felt connected to anything or anyone."
When his father died, de Zola says, "it was kind of rough. There was a whole implication that we weren't his. Even my name," he adds, "was something I wasn't really connected to. It was this feeling of total alienation."
To add to this feeling of rootlessness, the immediate time leading up to the release of the album saw de Zola lose his mother, his sister, and his brother, which led to a further sense of isolation.
"My mother was an anchor in my life and when she died, I decided that I was going to go learn about who I am."
That led to a trip to the city of Cusco, the center of the Inca empire. He met the celebrated Peruvian writer Lenyan Veka who taught him about the culture.
"I went down there on a mission to figure out what my roots are and try to get an appreciation of what this other world like. It was funny because my father said, 'There's nothing in Peru. Those people have no culture.' And I thought, 'How could you say that?'"
The trip became a moving experience and gave de Zola something sense of belonging. "That trip helped put a lot of questions to be for me."
Asked if it that connection accounts for some of the more pronounced Latin sounds on the new LP, he says, "Absolutely. Where I live in New Jersey is a very Latin area, kind of like a Spanish Harlem, my father and my mother always played a lot of classic Latin music—Perez Prado, ranchero music, Lucha Reyes, a famed Afro-Peruvian singer. The first music I ever heard was Latin music. But as a kid I never wanted anything to do with that."
He moved through a variety of expected phases, including metal and punk, "To me, all of that Latin-y stuff was seriously uncool. As I've gotten older, I've really come to appreciate it. It's on purpose that that there are a lot of Latin elements in the music. It's part of who I am, this identity that I've come to grips with."
Lyrically, a few of the songs deal with substance use or perhaps abuse. While shared experiences over drinks can lead to a sense of camaraderie, there can also be an isolative element to spirits.
"Sometimes when you're in freefall it's comforting to crawl into a bottle and self-medicating when you're trying to come to grips with meat hook realities," he says. "I think it's a fundamental need to belong to something."
Asked if he's worked through his sense of identity and feels like it's a way forward to a more focused sense of self and perhaps belonging, de Zola says, "I feel like there's a lot that I can put behind me now. It was kind of a way to wrestle the beast to the ground and have a look at it. Maybe now that I've dealt with a lot of those feelings I can put it behind me now."
