REVIEW: ZOÉ BASHA TAKES THE SCENIC ROUTE IN DARING DEBUT ALBUM ‘GAMBLE’
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY DANIELLE HOLIAN ☆
Photo By Louis Scully
There’s a kind of alchemy in Zoé Basha’s debut solo album Gamble—the kind that comes from years of wandering, listening, and quietly crafting songs out of fleeting glances, broken hearts, and windswept street corners. Basha, a French-American musician and composer based in Dublin, doesn’t just sing stories—she lives them, breathes them, and then lays them bare with a voice that feels like it was plucked from the grooves of a dusty 1930s jazz record.
A carpenter by trade, troubadour by calling, Basha spent the better part of the last decade hitchhiking, hopping freight trains, and busking her way across countries. That nomadic spirit permeates Gamble, a record that sounds as though it was recorded on the edge of a cliff, windswept and wide open, full of moments that feel like secrets whispered around a campfire.
Opening with a stripped-back a cappella rendition of the traditional ballad “Love Is Teasin’,” Basha doesn’t ease the listener in — she confronts them with stillness. Her voice is arresting, tremulous but sure, and it sets the tone for what’s to follow: a deeply intimate, often experimental, and genre-bending collection that defies easy categorization.
The title track, “Gamble,” begins with the gentle sway of Americana but quickly unfolds into something richer, more layered—country-folk meets subtle psychedelia, underpinned by a quiet sense of defiance. It’s a sonic manifesto of sorts, declaring Basha’s intent not to fit into boxes, but to build her own out of scraps, stories, and sound.
Throughout the album, she draws from a wide sonic palette—Appalachian folk, Irish trad, vintage blues, early jazz—but the result is unmistakably her own. “Same Swallows Swooping” is a clear standout: a featherlight melody carried on deft guitar work and fluttering vocal lines that echo Joni Mitchell’s phrasing, yet grounded in a rawness all Basha’s own. There’s joy in her storytelling, but it’s weathered, like laughter after tears.
“Dublin Street Corners” dances with time signatures, its piano line meandering like a street performer lost in reverie, a love letter to the life she’s lived among cobblestones and strangers’ coins. Meanwhile, “What Dream Is This” plunges into darker, more experimental territory. The track—fully produced by Basha herself—is a haunting soundscape of warped organ tones, ghostly harmonies, and dislocated rhythms. It’s the kind of song that demands repeat listens, each spin revealing a new shadow.
And then there’s the closer, “One Morning In May,” which ends the album with a hush, like the sudden stillness after a storm. Its “beautiful darkness,” as some have called it, is earned—a gentle descent that leaves the listener in a contemplative hush, unsure whether to smile or weep.
Basha holds nothing back in her storytelling. She writes of grief, intimacy, identity, and rebellion against societal norms—but with a poet’s restraint. There’s no grandstanding, no performative vulnerability. Instead, she offers slivers of her life, letting the silences between the notes speak volumes. It’s this humility that makes Gamble so compelling.
It doesn’t scream for your attention; it asks for your listening, and rewards those who give it.
Produced entirely by Basha and mastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer Ben Rawlins, the album’s sonic world is both vintage and forward-thinking. You can hear echoes of Billie Holiday’s melancholy, the melodic curiosity of The Mills Brothers, and the tender warble of Edith Piaf—but also the gritty honesty of her contemporaries in the Irish folk scene.
There’s a refreshing lack of polish here, in the best way. These are not songs sanded down for mass consumption; they are carved by hand, like the timber frames Basha once built in rural France. You can hear the woodgrain in them — the imperfections that make them beautiful, human, real.
Ultimately, Gamble is a reckoning. It’s the culmination of a decade of living on the road, of questioning what matters, and of finally choosing to risk it all for the thing that matters most: truth in music. Zoé Basha doesn’t just offer songs, she offers witness to a life, to a world, to the quiet gamble of choosing art in an age of noise.
And if Gamble is any indication of where she’s headed, it’s clear: Zoé Basha’s scenic route is just beginning, and it’s already breathtaking.
