Zoot Woman

The stylish electro-pop trio Zoot Woman draws from Hall & Oates and Roxy Music in equal measure with the Pet Shop Boys. At its core stand producer Stuart Price, active also as Les Rhythmes Digitales and Jacques Lu Cont, alongside brothers Johnny Blake and Adam Blake, who record together as the remix duo Paper Faces. Blending conventional instruments and performance techniques with vintage electronics, the three began collaborating in the mid-'90s and placed a couple of singles on Wall of Sound before Price turned his attention to Les Rhythmes Digitales. They reconvened for the 2000 single It's Automatic and, the next year, the album Living in a Magazine, a concept work examining the media-saturated culture of the twenty-first century. Their darker, more organic self-titled second album arrived in 2003 and generated the singles Grey Day and Taken It All. In 2008 the group launched its own label, ZWR, which issued Things Are What They Used to Be the following year—an album rooted in the trio’s affection for '80s synth-pop yet colored by harder electroclash textures. Star Climbing, released in 2014, marked a return to lighter, more atmospheric pop, typified by the opening track Don't Tear Yourself Apart.