Zaffre

If ‘Sunray’ was the exhale, ‘Zaffre’ is the album finding its footing again in the back half. A waltz-time blues rocker at a moderate pace in a major key, it grooves harder than a 3/4 signature has any right to. The electric guitar does the talking here, trading off between punchy rhythmic stabs and fluid melodic fills in a way that keeps the three minutes feeling genuinely conversational. The production is clean but not sterile, each instrument getting room to breathe without the mix losing its density. By this point in the record, the return to 3/4 feels like settling back into a preferred language rather than repetition. Fans of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s tighter instrumental work will find themselves at home. A confident restatement of the album’s core strengths at exactly the moment when the second half needed to prove itself.