Under the name Zenxith, 23-year-old singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Daniel McGee continues to prove that you don’t need a studio or a band or a lot of time to make something honest. With an ever-present sense of restless imagination, he wrote and recorded his 16th(!) DIY album, What’s Happening To Me?, entirely at his home in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, last few months.

The result is a magnetic unpolished set of 13 lo-fi indie pop songs, with jangling guitars, a drum machine, charming vocals, lots of tambourine bells, and lyrics that wander between melancholy confession and surreal absurdity. One moment the musician is whispering confessions in Listen Carefully and Beverly You Are My Cover Star (dedicated to Beverly Lucy Garland, whose photo from 1958 film The Saga of Hemp Brown you see in the cover art), the next he’s spinning ghostly humor through Headless Corpse and Dancing Skeleton. Behind the lo-fi haze lies something honest—a portrait of disconnection, self-doubt, and the uneasy comedy of being alive.

The record sounds like a diary cracked open in real time: intimate, imperfect, and strangely beautiful.

What’s Happening To Me?—written, performed, and recorded by Daniel McGee aka Zenxith—is out now digitally and on CD via Salt Mine Records.

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