You’ve probably heard Zahriya Zachary’s voice — you just might not know her name yet. As one of the newest faces of Bethel Music, she’s spent the last few years quietly leading worship on stages filled with familiar names. But her debut album, Rediscovery, finally places her voice front and center — and it’s a striking, intimate first impression.
The record doesn’t sound like a typical worship album. Rediscovery feels more like a collection of journal entries — tender, raw and full of the kind of tension that comes with growing up in faith. It’s not about having the right answers. It’s about learning to live with the questions.
“I didn’t discover anything new,” Zachary says. “Rediscovery means uncovering what’s already been there.”
Across 10 tracks, she unpacks what that means, peeling back the layers that had built up around her faith — the pressure, the performance, the pursuit of certainty — until she found what she’d been missing all along: friendship with Jesus.
Zachary’s story doesn’t start on a stage in Redding. It begins in Houston, where she grew up in a gospel-heavy church but spent her childhood obsessed with Alicia Keys. Her uncle gave her a bulky keyboard with flashing keys one Christmas, and she spent hours teaching herself to play by ear. She laughs thinking about it now — how something so small lit the spark.
“I’d sit there for hours,” she says. “Music was always around me, even though my family isn’t musical. I just loved songs.”
Still, she never planned to lead worship. At her church, the singers were larger-than-life vocalists who could “sing circles around anyone,” she says.
“I remember thinking, ‘I’m never doing that.’”
But during college at Texas Tech University, a girl from a campus ministry told her she felt Zachary was supposed to join the worship team — even though she’d never heard her sing. Zachary brushed it off at first, but after months of persistent invitations, she finally auditioned. She got the spot and has been leading worship ever since.
After college, she moved to Lubbock, working as a baker while leading worship at her church. It was a quiet life — one she assumed she’d live for decades.
“My dream was to be a worship pastor and stay there forever,” she says.
That changed during a live recording at her church when producers from Bethel Music were brought in to help. They noticed her voice, told Bethel about her and, months later, she received a call that would change her trajectory.
“I wasn’t chasing anything,” she says. “I was just in this hidden season with God, and suddenly, doors opened.”
That hiddenness — those quiet years out of the spotlight — shaped everything that came after. Rediscovery doesn’t sound like someone trying to prove herself. It’s patient, reflective and unhurried, the result of nearly four years of writing and re-writing until every lyric felt lived-in. Zachary says she learned to slow down and let the songs take shape at the same pace her faith was changing.
“Gone are the days of writing songs you haven’t actually lived,” she says. “With this album, I got to live them out.”
The first song, “Better Than I Thought,” became the emotional core of the project — a quiet revelation about how easily God’s love can be misunderstood. It led her to write the rest of the album around that rediscovery.
Zachary took a nontraditional route with production, working with three different producers — Bernie Herms, Bede Benjamin-Korporaal and Oscar Gamboa — none of whom knew each other. The process was chaotic, she admits, but it worked. She oversaw the project closely, making sure it carried a through-line of peace. Her direction to everyone was simple: every song should end in relief.
“I didn’t want people to think I’d deconstructed my faith,” she says. “I wanted them to know I’d found something — that I’m still with Jesus, still grounded.”
That insistence on hope gives Rediscovery its quiet power. The record doesn’t avoid tension, but it doesn’t drown in it either. It lives in the middle — where belief and doubt, pain and beauty, coexist.
“You can have tension with God and still have intimacy with Him,” Zachary says. “You need tension to make beautiful things. You need it in a guitar, in a piano. It’s part of creation.”
Zachary says she wrote the album for a generation that doesn’t accept easy answers. “We’re not going to follow something blindly,” she says. She wanted her songs to sound like permission — permission to ask questions, wrestle with uncertainty and still stay close to Jesus.
That’s where the idea of “rediscovery” took on new meaning. She describes it not as a breakthrough but as a returning — a reminder that God’s love had been constant even when her understanding of it shifted. “The Lord came in and uncovered so much for me so I could finally see Him clearly again,” she says.
That rediscovery led her back to friendship — not just reverence or service, but closeness. She says she wants listeners to remember that God isn’t just present on Sundays or in their lowest moments. “He’s with you when your kids are losing their minds, when you don’t want to get out of bed, when your anxiety is crippling,” she says. “He’s there in all of it.”
For Zachary, that awareness changed how she sees herself too. She no longer feels the need to perform for God or earn His approval. The more she let go of that, the freer she felt — both in life and in her music.
“It’s about finding relief,” she says. “You don’t have to perform for Him. He won’t love you more or less for what you do.”
Still, sharing something so personal was terrifying. Releasing Rediscovery felt like handing over her diary. “It’s like giving people pages from my journal,” she admits.
Not long after, she got the confirmation she needed. At a church in Nashville, a woman approached her in tears, saying Zachary’s song “Better Than I Thought” had carried her through a month of heartbreak. The moment left Zachary speechless. “That one person made it worth it,” she says quietly.
It’s the kind of story she tells with a mix of awe and disbelief — a reminder that none of those hidden years were wasted.
“The Lord honors vulnerability,” she says. “The people who are supposed to hear it will hear it.”
Now, with her first record out, Zachary feels free to look ahead. She wants her songs to keep connecting, to become something people claim as their own. “When someone says, ‘I know you wrote this, but it’s my song now,’ that’s the best feeling,” she says.
She often returns to a line from Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water: “It’s our responsibility to contribute to the stream. Whether it’s big or small, we all add something.”
That’s how she sees Rediscovery — not a grand debut, but a contribution. A humble offering of tension, honesty and trust.
“The first project is always the scariest,” she says, smiling. “But now I feel limitless. I gave myself permission to be vulnerable, and that’s the kind of permission I want my music to give others.”