Katzin
ABOUT
There's no easy way to grow up. Every plunge into adulthood brings thrill and regret, exhilaration and grief, anticipation and dread. You land, you shut the door on your infancy, you try to start your life. Buckaroo, the debut album from 20-year-old New York-based songwriter and recent Mexican Summer-signee Katzin, draws upon symbols of the mythologized American West — cowboys, horses, vast deserts, rolling plains, ancient rock formations — to trace that leap from adolescence to adulthood in all its unsteady shine.
Born in Alexandria, Virginia, Zion Battle spent his early childhood in Pasadena before moving to North Carolina for elementary school and then Manhattan in fifth grade. The summer after he graduated from high school, he broke ground on his first album as Katzin. He had just spent most of the summer in Europe, and came back to the United States inspired to explore what it means to be an American at this particular moment in history. What stories cling to people born and raised in this infinitely complex, haunted country, and what responsibilities do we have to them? Buckaroo swirls around these heated questions like smoke from a campfire at dusk.
Together with collaborator and producer Max Morgen, Battle drove from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree to start recording songs he'd written the previous spring. "It was a really anxious time. We were both heading off to college, getting ready to leave our homes and move to new states,” he says. “We packed up Max’s Subaru Impreza and set up a DIY recording studio in a cabin. It was really hot, and we were stuck inside. By isolating ourselves, we were able to capture this raw creative energy. It feels like we made a love letter to our childhoods."
Katzin released his debut album, Buckaroo, via Mexican Summer on February 13, 2026. Surging with rolling drums, filigreed synthesizers, and guitars that flip from a whisper to a thunder roll on a dime, Buckaroo renders the beauty of North America through a deceptively nonchalant electroacoustic collage. “One of our main goals was to make the album sound like the desert,” says Battle. “We talked about that a lot: How do we make the soundscape reflect the landscape?” Banjos spike through clouds of distortion on the delicate lost-love song “Anna,” violin courses over hazy vocoder on the bittersweet title track, and piano chimes rain down over churning guitar chords on “Cowboy.” Throughout the record, Battle blends the surreal wit of Pavement with the expansive gravitas of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, all while drawing from the warm, homespun atmospherics of early Orchid Tapes releases. These songs arc like contrails across the biggest sky you’ve ever seen.
There's no easy way to grow up. Every plunge into adulthood brings thrill and regret, exhilaration and grief, anticipation and dread. You land, you shut the door on your infancy, you try to start your life. Buckaroo, the debut album from 20-year-old New York-based songwriter and recent Mexican Summer-signee Katzin, draws upon symbols of the mythologized American West — cowboys, horses, vast deserts, rolling plains, ancient rock formations — to trace that leap from adolescence to adulthood in all its unsteady shine.
Born in Alexandria, Virginia, Zion Battle spent his early childhood in Pasadena before moving to North Carolina for elementary school and then Manhattan in fifth grade. The summer after he graduated from high school, he broke ground on his first album as Katzin. He had just spent most of the summer in Europe, and came back to the United States inspired to explore what it means to be an American at this particular moment in history. What stories cling to people born and raised in this infinitely complex, haunted country, and what responsibilities do we have to them? Buckaroo swirls around these heated questions like smoke from a campfire at dusk.
Together with collaborator and producer Max Morgen, Battle drove from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree to start recording songs he'd written the previous spring. "It was a really anxious time. We were both heading off to college, getting ready to leave our homes and move to new states,” he says. “We packed up Max’s Subaru Impreza and set up a DIY recording studio in a cabin. It was really hot, and we were stuck inside. By isolating ourselves, we were able to capture this raw creative energy. It feels like we made a love letter to our childhoods."
Katzin released his debut album, Buckaroo, via Mexican Summer on February 13, 2026. Surging with rolling drums, filigreed synthesizers, and guitars that flip from a whisper to a thunder roll on a dime, Buckaroo renders the beauty of North America through a deceptively nonchalant electroacoustic collage. “One of our main goals was to make the album sound like the desert,” says Battle. “We talked about that a lot: How do we make the soundscape reflect the landscape?” Banjos spike through clouds of distortion on the delicate lost-love song “Anna,” violin courses over hazy vocoder on the bittersweet title track, and piano chimes rain down over churning guitar chords on “Cowboy.” Throughout the record, Battle blends the surreal wit of Pavement with the expansive gravitas of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, all while drawing from the warm, homespun atmospherics of early Orchid Tapes releases. These songs arc like contrails across the biggest sky you’ve ever seen.
