Shayan Regan spots God in a meteor dive on the opening track of his debut full-length, “dead but she looks so alive.” It’s the kind of image that tells you immediately what register this album operates in: cosmic, a little unhinged, and earnest enough to pull it off. Zero Hour: Genesis uses the language of outer space to describe what love does to a person from the inside, and over thirteen tracks, it builds a surprisingly coherent emotional world out of nebula drips, burning suns, and the quiet gravity of human connection.
The album draws from Fleetwood Mac’s layered harmonies, Pink Floyd’s textural drift, and the melodic instincts of the Beatles, filtered through a contemporary lens that keeps the warmth without becoming a period piece. Producers Regan, Damiano Lucchesi, and Ashton Hartman favor color and texture over polish, and the result is a record that breathes. Guitars shimmer. Bass lines settle in rather than push forward. The vocal harmonies feel discovered rather than engineered.
What distinguishes the record from other space-themed pop is its specificity. “Zero Hour Lunar Phase,” co-written with Roger Alexander and Jen Krisik, doesn’t traffic in generic cosmic imagery. Moon-milk clocks melt slow. A shadow is made of thyme. Love arrives “dripping and lemon-laced.” These are details that feel genuinely strange, and the strangeness keeps the song from coasting on atmosphere alone. “Spaceship L-U-V” takes a different approach, grounding its relationship drama in a satisfying comic reversal: both parties smiling and flipping each other off until the whole thing collapses into falling in love. At two minutes and twenty seconds, it’s gone before you’ve settled in, which is exactly the right call.
“Pink Mars” is the album’s most immediately singable track, and it earns that quality through lyrical simplicity rather than production tricks. The fantasy of a place where “Martians don’t use iPhones” and there are “no bluebirds or Rolling Stones” works because Regan commits to it fully. “Every Sol that I spend here’s my last / I think I wanna stay” captures the specific logic of early infatuation, the way a new feeling makes ordinary life feel like something worth abandoning.
The duet “You’re So Uninviting,” written by Sophia Dawn Regan and featuring Molly Coleman, is the album’s most dramatically convincing moment. The two vocalists trade a relationship that’s irresistible and exhausting in equal measure, and the chorus builds through three variations on the same feeling: “I feel so alive when I’m with you / a flash in the night when I’m with you / a crash of delight when I’m with you.” The momentum keeps returning despite itself, which mirrors what the lyric is actually about. The oven left on, the door wide open, the question of whether there’s something that was forgotten to be mentioned: these small domestic details land harder than any of the album’s grander cosmic gestures.
“Callistoa’s Odyssey” names its subject after one of Jupiter’s moons and describes her eyes as burning quasars, her wake full of supernovas. It reaches further than anything else on the record and mostly holds. “Our Burning Sun” strips things back, tap dancing on Jupiter’s rings as a metaphor for partnership, asking who cares what gets left behind with Helios watching. The image of going blind from the light and misbehaving, skipping like asteroids off solar flares just to stay alive, is one of the album’s best stretches of writing.
“A World of Little Worlds” grounds everything that precedes it, offering friends, family, and the small pleasures of being alive as plain reasons to stay on the planet. The hope that his spirit floats in the atmosphere after death so he can still be near his loved ones when they float up too, so they can have “a little party there,” is affecting in a way the album’s bigger moments don’t quite reach. It works because it asks nothing of the listener except recognition.
Closer “Lost and Found” ends the record in a time loop with a ghost, matter dreaming of meaning, faith drowned in the void. “Where the faith is drowned / and if the cosmos allows / you’re lost, then found” is the album’s most lyrically compressed moment, and it closes things without resolution, which is the honest place to land. There is a larger universe being hinted at here. Zero Hour: Genesis is content to be the opening of it.
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