Laps Around the Sun

Editors’ Notes Perhaps thanks to his upbringing on Australia’s Sunshine Coast, Ziggy Alberts’ music is imbued with the laidback, rootsy acoustic charm of fellow surfing enthusiast Jack Johnson’s. He addresses a failed romance on “Love Me Now” (“My voice is getting tired/And I’m sick of arguing with you”), but Laps Around the Sun also explores life after heartache. A fictional girl called Koda is a central character throughout—a device Alberts uses to explore the qualities he wants in a relationship with a partner and with himself—most literally in closer “Yu (A Song for Koda)”. “She’s not a girl on a pedestal/She’s a girl you sit next to,” he sings in the gorgeous finale.