About
Babytooth is the full band project of Portland, OR-based singer/songwriter Isabel Zacharias. Annie Fifer (Yellow Room) lends guitar leads by turns distorted and crystal-clear, with Hugh Jepson (Soft Cheese, Moon Shy) behind the drums and Benson Chong (Honeydiu, How Strange It Is) splitting time between bass & keyboards.
Fitting into and elaborating on the lineage of Pacific Northwest indie, the songs move between noisy melodic rock & twinkly folk experiments, recalling the scrappy '90s/early-aughts rock of the region as much as the incisive lyrical focus of acts like Smog and Silver Jews.
A first EP, Thataway, arrived in 2020 via cassette-only label Bud Tapes — and its subsequent success helped establish the imprint as a go-to curator of the ever-evolving Portland DIY scene. With a debut full-length set for release in August 2023 via Bud and like-minded tape label Antiquated Future, Zacharias continues to write literate, intimate song portraits of distraction and awareness, aging and loss, comic relief, and the everyday.
"Each track is a small slice of life where modest details accumulate into something larger, the voice often emotive and sometimes playful, somehow both vulnerable and defiant in the face of existence, and never without a memorable turn of phrase." -Various Small Flames
"Easist to pinpoint in singer and songwriter Isabel Zacharias’ verses are the breadcrumbs of identity, the ones we don’t think so much about choosing: yearbook signature cliches, coin collections, dearly departed fish, smartphones plopped in cups. The EP is run through with an obsessively declarative lyrical stance...equal parts world-building and defiant. But then there’s Zacharias’ second voice (her fluid, supercharged falsetto) and that of the band, often threatening to explode." -OPB Music
