Buckaroo, the debut album from 20-year-old New York-based songwriter and recent Mexican Summer-signee Katzin, draws upon symbols of the mythologized American West — cowboys, horses, vast deserts, rolling plains, ancient rock formations — to trace that leap from adolescence to adulthood in all its unsteady shine. The album is out February 13, 2026 via Mexican Summer.
Born in Alexandria, Virginia, Zion Battle spent his early childhood in Pasadena before moving to North Carolina for elementary school and then Manhattan in fifth grade. The summer after he graduated from high school, he broke ground on his first album as Katzin. He had just spent most of the summer in Europe, and came back to the United States inspired to explore what it means to be an American at this particular moment in history.
Together with collaborator and producer Max Morgen, Battle drove from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree to start recording songs he’d written the previous spring. “It was a really anxious time. We were both heading off to college, getting ready to leave our homes and move to new states,” he says. “We packed up Max’s Subaru Impreza and set up a DIY recording studio in a cabin. It was really hot, and we were stuck inside. By isolating ourselves, we were able to capture this raw creative energy. It feels like we made a love letter to our childhoods.”
This is captured in the dreamy hum of “Wild Horses,” (above) a track that feels like a profound elevation of bedroom recording principles, spinning out a clockwork arrangement into something wild and wide-screened before exploding into a guitar solo that hints a Battle’s music school background. It’s an emotive and enthralling first offering that displays a technical mastery and clarity of vision that belie Battle’s 20 years.
- Tightrope
- Anna
- Wild Horses
- Hope
- Wake up Ruben
- Cottonmouth
- Shortwave
- All Hat, No Cattle
- Cowboy
- Buckaroo
- Nantucket
