Engraving Of Armor

Beck Zegans — 2026

“Engraving Of Armor keeps shifting shape, moving from dreamlike calm to guitar-scraping tension.”

Beck Zegans spent years playing guitar in Palehound and releasing music under the name Goo, but Engraving Of Armor is her first album under her own name, and it hits you with the confidence of someone who has been quietly waiting for the right moment. The record actually grew out of pandemic restlessness, with Zegans moving toward harder, more confrontational sounds. You can hear it in almost every track here as you think a song may be taking a more mellow road until it ramps up with guitar noise and slight distortion which completely turns your head – in a good way. At any moment, guitars grind and push against a backbone of rhythm built from drum loops she wrote to at home. So many times the seamless fluidity on Engraving Of Armor will quickly move between noise rock and almost dreamlike folk without ever sounding scattered. It is such a natural blend that hitting play again feels inevitable!

Lyrically, Zegans is writing about self-protection and the cost of it, about wanting something badly enough to run in the opposite direction. There is a line in “I Want You” that says it plainly: “In rivers of beautiful trash, we’re all hiding from the things we want too bad.” That kind of bluntness runs through the whole album. These are not songs about feelings so much as songs about what we do to avoid them, and Zegans is smart enough to find humor and even a little relief in that admission.

“When You Were In My Bed” opens the record with a cautious quiet. It has the biggest Sonic Youth vibe on the record with its balance of Zegans’ narration and the pulsing instruments. “Love In The End Times” is wide open and shimmering, with synths that surface slowly beneath her vocal. I think it is the most quietly beautiful thing here, the kind of song that sounds better later at night. Especially when she emphasizes the chorus “Take me when you go roaming. There’s nothing really worth owning. All my needing is just eating our time.” “Riddle” has this intense synth beat running through it, living up to its title, a coiled three minutes that gets under your skin in a good way. El Kempner of Palehound plays guitar on it, and the interplay between Kempner’s lead lines and the underlying synth riff gives the track a fractured, kaleidoscopic feel that rewards repeated listens. “I Want You” hits the opposite end of the dial, verses that simmer on low before the chorus opens into something noisy with muscular guitar and crashing drums.

Fans of Autolux’s textural precision and the blunt emotional confrontations of Fontaines D.C. can find a connection to this album. You can absolutely hear echoes of Kim Deal in Zegans’ intense vocal presence here with the Breeders at their most unhurried. There is also an undertone of Sonic Youth in the way Kim Gordon used to float her deeper vocal right under the noise.

Engraving Of Armor is an album about the distance we keep from the things we want most, and somehow it closes that distance every time you press play.