zoom

Soda Stereo played a game of mirrors in Zoom that begins before the first note even sounds. It’s not a song that hits you all at once: first comes a dry, almost robotic drumbeat, lingering like an echo in an empty room. That’s the trap: that square, repetitive rhythm seems lifted from a minimalist percussion manual, but at 0:32 Gustavo Cerati shatters the silence with a spoken-word passage that sounds like a whispered confession. He doesn’t sing—he recites—and that voice sliding between words—“we’re all addicts,” “what seduces never tends to be”—is the hook. The lyrics aren’t about love, but about desire as an addiction, about fantasies viewed through a lens that never quite comes into focus. And that lens is the harmonica, which enters at 1:58 as a long sigh, almost a lament, before a keyboard carries it into the song’s bridge. The ending, with that abrupt drum hit and the harmonica fading away, leaves the feeling that something was left unsaid, as if the song itself were a zoom that never quite finishes closing in.

The recording of Zoom wasn’t a meticulous studio process: it emerged during the sessions for Sueño Stereo, Soda Stereo’s final album released in 1995, by which point the band had already spent years redefining rock in Spanish. The album was recorded in Buenos Aires, but Zoom’s sound carries layers that aren’t just Argentine. The harmonica riff and the clapping drums seeping in from New York Groove by Hello—written by Russ Ballard—lend it a British glam-rock air that contrasts with the rest of the record. Even the organ from This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us by Sparks peeks through at some point, as if the song had absorbed influences without asking permission. The video, directed by Chilean José Muriente and filmed outside the Planetario Galileo Galilei, reinforces that idea of controlled chaos: teenagers kissing in a park while the band plays in the shadows, as if the song were both a public and private ritual at once. In 2005, the track appeared in a Chilean VTR On Demand commercial, and over a decade later, a clip of its live performance in Lima in the 2020s went viral online under the title Les voy a sacar una foto, eh. ¡Sácame la luz!, proving that Zoom’s hook still works even outside its original context.