Since the release of her first EP as Zelma Stone in 2019, Chloe Zelma Studebaker (she/they) has shown herself to be an inimitable songwriter, capable of holding life’s most challenging complexities with both tenderness and craft. Sorrow and acceptance, love and loss, faith and doubt sit side-by-side in the gripping sonic worlds she builds, her voice a raw harbinger of truths that are at once devastating and affirming. Her upcoming EP A Dance is her most sharply-focused work yet, the result of an artist both unafraid to probe her heart and ready to release herself from the grip of a painful past.

Though Zelma began the project in her childhood home outside San Francisco in 2017, the foundations of her music are rooted in a childhood spent listening to her older brother play guitar and write music, and absorbing the music he and her grandfather shared. Early influences like Patsy Cline and Elvis gave way to a fascination with Bossa Nova and contemporary left-of-center songwriters like Amen Dunes. The art of songcraft became Zelma’s first safe haven in early moments of profound grief, her songs the space through which she could exercise, explore, and transmute pain.

Zelma Stone has been a mainstay of the Bay Area music scene since the project’s founding. She has opened for artists such as Bartees Strange, Miya Folick, Madeline Kenney and Alice Boman, and has released three previous EPs, including the critically-acclaimed Dreamland (2020), which NPR called “Beautiful and appealing,” noting “a quiet defiance in these songs.” Newly relocated to Los Angeles and releasing her fourth collection of music, this defiance has been energized with decided purpose. “I’m here and ready for love,” she repeats over the course of “Be The One,” affirming that both as person and artist she is ready, open, here.