The conceit is a three-act structure: Collapse, Humanity, Ascent. Concept albums have a poor record of surviving their own architecture, usually buckling under the weight of a narrator who knows too much. Zoro's advantage is biography. Born in India, raised between South India and California, a third culture kid who has served in the US Air Force Reserve while studying at Berkeley, he is both inside the American machine and standing slightly to one side of it. The album's governing tension, two Americas sharing one exhaustion, comes from a man who has seen both queues at the same airport.

Phase I is the angriest stretch and, wisely, the most playful. "Fucking Dance" (offered also in a radio-friendly "Freaking Dance" edit, a joke about American squeamishness that the album is smart enough to leave unexplained) sets the mood: a party thrown on the deck of something that is slowly sinking. "Falling Through The Fire" follows with real momentum. Economic inequality, ecological exhaustion and racial division could easily have been dealt with in a series of sermons. Instead Zoro writes them as situations, people in rooms with problems, and trusts the listener to do the arithmetic.

The pivot arrives with "Give Me A World" and the title-adjacent "Human Again", and it is the album's quiet masterstroke. Having spent a third of its running time in the wreckage, the record changes its posture without changing its voice. Zoro sings with the unhurried warmth of someone who has stopped trying to win the argument. "Love Just Fades Away" takes on modern dating culture with a rueful, wry tenderness, a small, intimate tragedy placed deliberately beside the large public ones. The effect is to remind you that collapse is rarely a single event; it is a thousand unreturned messages.

Then comes "Children of the Storm", the record's moral centre, which approaches gun violence with a restraint that makes it land all the harder. Zoro does not stage the horror. He stays with the aftermath, the ordinary mornings that follow, and the song is the better for withholding catharsis. "Shades With Ease" and "Slash The Ghost" carry the album into its final movement with a lighter step, and the latter earns a second appearance as a bonus track in a female version. It is a generous inclusion, and a revealing one: the song holds its shape when the voice changes, which is the surest sign of a well-built melody.

"Live Beyond" closes the album on hope, which is the most difficult note to hit without sounding like a greeting card. Zoro earns it by having paid for it. After the fire, the storm and the ghost, the optimism sounds hard-won, not purchased.

Credit is due for the sheer completeness of the vision. Zoro wrote, produced and directed the whole thing himself, and the Dolby Atmos mix suggests an artist who thinks of a record as a space to be walked through, not just a sequence to be played. 

*MAHA* is an earnest, intelligent and unexpectedly moving debut from an artist who believes a pop album can still carry an argument. In an American musical landscape crowded with irony, his sincerity is its own kind of daring. Make a note of the name.