The Zolas are set for Revelry opening show

The Zolas, who had a breakthrough year in 2016 with their Juno-nominated “Swooner”, are back in Kelowna armed with new material steeped in the Britpop style of the 1990s.

The Vancouver outfit plays at the new Revelry Food+Music Hub, on Ellis Street Saturday night.

“You won’t feel like you’re at The Hacienda club, but you’ll feel like you’re hanging out with friends the morning after having been at The Hacienda club,” lead singer and guitarist Zach Gray told Kelowna10 about the band’s latest music.

He was referencing the iconic 1980s nightclub in Manchester, England that was instrumental in the careers of the likes of Oasis and Stone Roses.

The band admits, unashamedly, their latest album, Come Back To Life, is around two decades late but they’ve never been more excited about playing.

“A few years ago, we really got into flip phone UK music of all types. That mid-90s era in the UK was just this incredible era of Cool Britannia I guess,” Gray explained. “There’s a ton of commercially viable and just weird music that came out of that time.”

Interestingly, Gray also notes it was a time of the nascent internet “…when we had all the good stuff about the internet and communication; before it metastasized into the bad stuff we have now.”

While the frontman said the Kelowna audience can expect some of their songs to exude that sing-a-long, anthemic, guitar-led sound of the 90s era, their work, like past albums, retains a focus on the apocalyptic with pop lyrics never shying away from serious conversations like the climate crisis or housing affordability.

“There’s always a handful of personal songs and then a handful of songs that are a cross section of conversations we’d had with people, there’s a lot of apocalyptic talk,” he noted.

“Even stuff that’s hard to write about; like how all your friends start to disappear from where you live because they can’t afford to live there,."

The Zolas haven’t done much touring since the end of the pandemic. And although they've played some gigs in the US, Gray is excited about being back in Kelowna to be part of what he hopes will be the start of something special at Revelry.

“Yeah, especially in Kelowna which is a town we’ve come to a lot, but in recent years there haven’t been a lot of venues to play at. So, here’s a new one, and maybe it’ll be the beginning of something really classic and deeply embedded in Kelowna.”