Music Crowns is proud to premiere the deeply personal and genre-blurring new album Toronto Tapes by indie-rock singer-songwriter Zweng—a bold and honest testament to healing, reinvention, and rediscovery.
Emerging from a year of sobriety, spiritual reckoning, and total creative reset, Zweng returns with Toronto Tapes, his most vulnerable and vital work to date. Blending indie, rock, and alt-pop through a raw, analog lens, the album finds its emotional power not in perfection—but in honesty. Recorded at Toronto’s Kensington Sound Studios and produced by Will Schollar, the album captures a moment of deep transformation for an artist reclaiming his truth.
“This record is the sound of me coming back to myself,” Zweng shares. “I had veered so far from who I was supposed to be, and Toronto Tapes is what it looked like to find that person again.”
Across the gripping tracks, Zweng delivers emotionally charged reinterpretations of classics by A-ha (Take On Me), The Pretenders (Back on the Chain Gang), Billy Joel (Uptown Girl), and more—each reimagined to reflect themes of addiction, grief, and self-acceptance. But it’s the original songs like Marianne, written from the imagined voice of the partner his mother deserved, and Jeanette, a tribute to a grandmother he never met, that ground the album in emotional truth.
Standout track Good To Be Free channels the euphoric defiance of Oasis with a sober clarity that sets the tone for the album’s journey. Meanwhile, Pet Sematary becomes a chilling metaphor for relapse, and Changes (a rework of the Ozzy Osbourne classic) closes the album on a note of tentative hope, offering no easy answers—only the courage to keep evolving.
Zweng’s path has been anything but linear—from leading the psych-rock outfit Coo Coo Birds, to composing for TV in L.A., to now studying music production at Abbey Road Institute in London. But Toronto Tapes is the turning point: raw, real, and rooted in hard-won freedom.
With two more albums on the horizon and a new YouTube series, The Rock n Roll Animal, launching this June, Zweng isn’t just making music—he’s building a movement of creative resilience. And it all starts here.
🎧 Listen to Toronto Tapes—premiering now exclusively on Music Crowns.
