Jeremy Moore runs Saccharine Underground out of Washington D.C., and Avoidance Moon — the seventh Zabus full-length, out February 24 — arrives at a moment when the city itself feels occupied. The album channels that pressure without becoming a document of it. Moore shifts between male, female, and non-binary lyrical voices across the record, treating identity as a site of ongoing conflict rather than a fixed position. The “Moon” in the title maps a state of consciousness, not a place. The production leans hard into vintage equipment and its imperfections — deliberate, unhinged, immediate. Melodies veer off-axis. Song structures resist resolution. “Burst Oppression” moves with the coiled energy of someone who has already decided to act. Moore’s earlier Zabus records processed grief after his father’s death; this one processes rage at a world moving backward. The two feelings share a frequency. Moore also runs Bell Barrow, a noise and free jazz project, and Zero Swann, a deathrock/psych-noise vehicle. Avoidance Moon draws from all of it — the gothic romanticism of Zabus, the improvisational chaos of Bell Barrow, the raw guitar violence of Zero Swann — and funnels it into something that holds together as a statement.
