Effie Zilch – Higher Calling
San Francisco duo Effie Zilch announce their new LP, Higher Calling (out July 10 via Redtone Records) with its lead single, “Easy.”
“Easy” is written as a message to a daughter, and that perspective gives it this really grounded emotional pull: “You can’t rely on the powers that be… you’ve got to take it easy on your mother.”
Higher Calling builds on that same feeling, but stretches it across a much wider sonic palette; these soulful-gospel elements plus Motown backbeats and deconstructed blues all woven together. It’s a more riff-driven record than their previous work, wrapped in tape echo and wall-of-sound reverb. This isn’t a record chasing a moment, but one guided by instinct, one more interested in craft than trends.
Effie Zilch is the collaboration between Grammy-winning producer and guitarist Steve Wyreman, whose work spans artists connected to Jay-Z, Rihanna, John Legend, and Leon Bridges, and vocalist/guitarist Evanne Barcenas, a multidisciplinary artist whose voice anchors the project’s emotional core. Together, they make music rooted in the Bay Area’s countercultural lineage, where soul, gospel, and blues feel less like genres and more like a shared language.
On July 10 via Redtone Records, San Francisco duo Effie Zilch returns with Higher Calling, a sonically expansive and riff-driven collection guided by a philosophy that privileges instinct over industry. The album answers not to trends or expectations, but to something more enduring – a deep commitment to their craft.
Higher Calling is Effie Zilch’s fifth studio album in three years, arriving three months after their latest EP, The Kitchen Sink. True to the core of the pair’s perspective, the music is explorative, diverse, and unrestrained. Led by Grammy-winning producer and guitar slinger Steve Wyreman and vocalist-guitarist Evanne Barcenas, the album’s cohesion lies in the mastery of form and purpose – always answering to the calling of the muses, not the masses. More of a riff-based album than its predecessors, the duo employs gospel piano, Motown backbeats, and deconstructed blues to come up with fresh transformations of standard forms – sometimes playful, sometimes searching, always human.
The journey begins with “Easy,” a restrained, gospel-leaning meditation delivered like a Sunday sermon, slipping gently into Bay Area funk in the lineage of the great Sly Stone. From there, “Lover Boy” offers a tongue-in-cheek, soul-infused groove built on a Benny Benjamin-style backbeat and an undeniable sense of charm, before “The Argo” drifts into mythic longing.
“Salton Sea” settles into a desert mirage, while “Teardrops” sinks into a corner of Tin Pan Alley with a sultry, intimate ache. “Underneath the Weather” turns outward with a communal call-to-action, before “On the Loose” breaks free entirely – driving and unflinching in its search for freedom.
By the time the title track arrives, wrapped in tape echoes and wall-of-sound reverb, the answer feels simple and profound: every wandering soul searches for a higher purpose, yet sometimes the truest calling is not destiny or glory, but the quiet masterpiece of loving someone in the fleeting moment we share.
Effie Zilch is a product of San Francisco’s mythology and musical legacy. The name itself comes from a figment of legendary journalist Herb Caen’s imagination, a muse he conjured to inspire decades of work for the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen wrote for a fictional woman content at home with her family, sipping coffee and enjoying a quiet life. What he did not envision was a second act, one unfolding in studios and on stages, spinning that same introspection into rock n’ roll. This is where the duo departs from the path of its namesake.
Wyreman and Barcenas’ musical partnership feels like a natural extension of the Bay Area’s countercultural golden age. Together, they channel a wide and deeply referential palette reminiscent of Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix, and the Staple Singers, while drawing just as easily from poetry, painting, and classical composition. Walt Whitman, Maxfield Parrish, and Ravel sit comfortably alongside analog textures, chambered reverb, and tape-driven warmth.
Wyreman, whose work spans collaborations connected to artists like Jay-Z, Rihanna, John Legend, Logic, and Leon Bridges, brings a deep fluency in translating vintage sound into modern recordings. His early years touring with Mary J. Blige and Lauryn Hill, and later sharing stages with Richard Ashcroft, The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Oasis, inform a production style rooted in both reverence and reinvention.
As a team, Wyreman and Barcenas share not only decades of friendship and collaboration, but a unified artistic sensibility. Their work moves along the edges of strict genre lines, grounded instead in a belief that music should elevate and reflect a broader creative life. When they’re not recording, you’ll find them browsing used bookstores, digging through record bins, or taking in film and art wherever they can find it, with each influence feeding back into the songs they carefully shape.
Across Higher Calling and beyond, Effie Zilch isn’t chasing a moment. They’re building a body of work that treats music as part of a larger artistic continuum. It’s an approach rooted in curiosity and a refusal to separate sound from the world that shapes it, inviting listeners to step out of the noise and into something lasting.
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