Zack Villere is a Louisiana-born experimental pop artist, producer, and illustrator with one foot in New York and the other in a self-imagined alter-earth. His protean, vibrant, playful cartoons and recordings have caught the eyes and ears of Dijon, Tyler, the Creator, 454, Liv.e, Rosalía, and a cult fanbase in the years since his debut album Little World crash landed on our home planet. 

Zack has spent the past half-decade on a few different album concepts, finally settling on his next full-length LP SNOEY. It’s a quantum leap forward for someone we first met in his lofi Froyo Ma era. As the 2020s progressed and Zack moved from city to city, his $100 sticker-plastered six-string and trusted MPC remained by his side — objects of offline devotion, companions for incognito dry runs. He hunkered down and answered industry pressure with a relentless focus on practice and craft. 

“I started playing these small acoustic shows wherever I traveled without promoting them, using fake names that made me laugh like Cymbal Jilliams,” Zack says. “Using performance as practice in this way helped me break through in recording as well.” 

That refreshed approach carried over into the making of SNOEY, which became Zack’s most collaborative project to date. A prismatic realm shaped by friends new and old, the album features Florida great 454, folk hero denis biblioni (singing here in Tamil), LA’s eternal wunderkind Roy Blair, and the pitch-perfect Mulherin twins returning to Zack’s orbit in their best light. Personal inspirations (Lantern Parade, Rockie Rode, Samba Jean-Baptiste, among others) also contribute to the patchwork. 

"One of my favorite things to do is zoom in on whatever I see as unique about a person’s voice or style, like Marshall [Mulherin]’s falsetto section on Issy. It’s something you can’t get from anyone else,” Zack says. 

In this infectious, half-fiction world of banished yetis, anime-worthy cretins, boy band choreography, hushed duets, heartwarming R&B runs, hyperlocal hip-hop guests, and pointed lyricism about intimacy misfires and mutual longings, Villere stands firmly in his most realized work to date. The artist-producer has come a long way since getting lost in the bayous around New Orleans. One of music’s most endearing voices is all grown up.