Is Alternative Rock a Misnomer? “Buildings”, Zastava’s Debut Album, and Alt Rock Genre Conformity
Zastava on Instagram announcing their debut album, Buildings, June 13th, 2025.
Detroit, Michigan is a music hub most famed for the birth of Motown, but did you know in the 60s and 70s this Motor City laid much groundwork for punk, hardcore, and alt rock? On June 13th, Detroit based alternative rock newcomers Zastava, comprised of Mateja Matic, Arman Bonislawski, Cam Frank, and Ollie Elkus, released their first self-produced studio album, Buildings, and it is undoubtedly a prime sign of the times at the resurgence of the Detroit scene’s prolificity. Pooling just under 2.5k Spotify monthly listeners (at the time of writing this), this underrated band should be on the precipice of a major surge in fans following a strong debut album release. With drowning vocals, guitar tones full of crunch, relentless power chord hammering, piercing feedback, and a snare with the punch of a gunshot, Zastava takes alt rock by the balls and makes themselves an emblem of the genre.
But before getting pedantic in a song-by-song analysis (pedantic is hyperbolic, I won’t get too pretentious here), I want to offer some overarching sentiments on the band. First, for a debut album, Zastava enters with a confidence and consistency in their sound, an important first step in establishing discernibility, and a factor that’s proving to garner them a strong fan base beyond the constraints of live show goers in their area as monthly listeners steadily rise. Props. Second, I wish they had diversified their guitar tone throughout the album more, but other than that I found their songs maintained a synergy to the band’s sound while avoiding getting boring. Half props. With this do I proceed:
Buildings opens strong and steady with “Running”, driving us headfirst into a chugging, punchy raucous timbre that follows us throughout the album and descending into further chaos. It’s a perfect introduction in that it’s accurately telling of the album’s overall vibe as well as the energy of the band you’re about to implore. We then slow things down with “Truth”, which offers some really cool dissonance and rhythm in clashing guitar sections.
“Station” starts incredibly similarly and proceeds similarly; personally I would’ve considered either splitting these two farther in the album lineup or combining them into one long song with seemingly two sections, but I digress. However, “Station” progresses into a dynamic and rhythmic switch up halfway through, dialing it back to only grow, an element very Car Seat Headrest-esque. “Sation” transitions beautifully into “Out Here” (I love when songs flow into one another within an album, proving it to be a faction of a bigger work), the band’s current most popular song. “Out Here” maintains the most upbeat garage-rock-ish song so far, so get excited to mosh to this one.
“Fences” proceeds and keeps our rhythm from getting redundant by delving into a few triplet patterns in the intro; a fun switch up from the constant chugging that “Out Here” exhausted. We then move into “Interlude”, which seemingly hangs over our heads as layers of guitar sustain before being brought in full force by drums. “68” is to follow, and it’s my personal favorite. I find “68” to be the most diverse both structurally within the song and as a whole in accordance with the rest of the album. Not only do they play the greatest with dynamics in this song (a preference of mine) but about 3 minutes in we get the coolest strings (at least I think that’s what I’m hearing) that sustain over the song. It's an innovative sound like this that keeps a song and an album fresh and exciting. “68” grows into this wailing between all parts, from vocals to guitars to strings , while keeping grounded by slow and steady percussion. This song takes the listener on a journey that engages them all the way through; if I were to recommend any song from Buildings, it’s “68”.
We close out Zastava’s debut album with its namesake, “Buildings”. It is truly one for the mosh pits, returning to the upbeat cadence and structure of this harder rock sound they’ve established an affinity for. Also there’s a quick but awesome bass solo (bassist enthusiast here).
Buildings album cover
Buildings is a strong album, let alone an impressive debut album for a band. The production is good and I’d argue there wasn’t a single bad song amongst the 8. I’m really interested to see where this band goes from here, since they structurally, tonally, and rhythmically, have such a clear, obvious idea of what they want their sound to be or how they want their sound to start and progress within their songs. My main criticism though is also kind of exactly that; it’s a double edged sword. I’m struggling to hear what differentiates this band from so many others. Buildings is a solid album, one I’ll absolutely continue to listen to and urge you all to add to your playlists, but to say it’s groundbreaking or it’s something we’ve never heard the likes of before, well I might meet you with some pushback. I might even go as far as calling them redundant, but that very well could be from the fact that I listened to these songs on repeat for this article. I don’t think structural conformity to a well known successful genre is particularly a negative thing however, the structure works because the structure is good. While part of me thinks that makes the entire concept of “alt” rock a misnomer, I also understand that this adherence is a large part of the reason why this is a no-skip album to me. Fans of similar sounds can easily flock to Zastava, finding comfort in the walls of sounds within the mosh pits this band ensues, finding comfort in the genre they love, finding comfort in this band. But now Zastava must ask themselves the question: Do we want to be comfortable?
