Zola Jesus - A voice born in the dark

If we examine her first attempt at a full-length, that New Amsterdam released on CD-R in 2009 (again on Sacred Bones), we can dig through its noisy obstacles and its, at times, oppressive psychedelic monotony to find the lo-fi elegy of a dream-pop searching for a ray of light, or else the proud post-punk regurgitation of someone enamoured with the sickest, most corroded Suicide as well as the most acidic no wave ("New Amsterdam", "Odessa", "Dogs"). A soul that knows how to narrate a metallic tragedy, sharp, cynical and lyrical at once, as on the excellent "Last Day", a pearl of matte black that already conceals within it the vocal strength of the future Zola Jesus.

Thus the EP Stridulum was born, which would as in two versions, American and European (with different tracklists), presenting the image of a singer immersed in a different kind of night, no longer lost within a post-atomic horizon or some lo-fi–goth nightmare, but able to stitch together the different souls of a style that unites ethereal spirituality with the neon lights of an alienating urban geometry.

While "I Can't Stand" swims between love and death, and "Night" dances melancholically, sensually, during a slow nocturnal escape from glacial solitude, it's the title track that reveals the soul of a chrysalis, suspended on a plane of mystical reflection, a kind of marvelous soliloquy with eyes closed in which she seeks to reach the spectre of Meredith Monk.

The psychic dimension of Stridulum can be detected right from the title, which references an old 1979 cult film centered on paranormal powers in a battle between good and evil; a pleasantly twisted vision of reality that we'll find even more distorted in her collaboration with Amanda Brown (Pocahaunted) and her LA Vampires project.

LA Vampires Meets Zola Jesus is an interesting EP, perhaps a bit too underrated by the critics who followed Nika's rapid trajectory. A vinyl release on the hypest underground label of all, San Francisco's Not Not Fun (co-founded by A. Brown herself), on which we find her playing and dancing among sonic patterns on the border between tribal and free-synth, transmuting her vocal power into something imaginative, new and spectral.

The triptych "Searching", "Vous" and "Bone Is Bloodstone" exemplifies this world transmuted by Zola Jesus's dark lyricism and LA Vampires's psychedelic textures, where low-fidelity fog mixes with heavy, crooked rhythms to leave room only for rays of light saturated with acidic colours.

Conatus. A name drawn from a specific philosophical and religious, intimate reading, describing an effort, an intrinsic will to live. This is the concept Zola Jesus chose to attach to her second true full-length. Released in 2011, again on Sacred Bones, it's the record that in some ways marked the beginning of the Russian-American artist's maturity. Cleansed and pure white, she stands in profile on the album cover, wrapped in a transparent veil representing a sacerdotal icon, suspended in space. The rhythms have lost the martial, mechanical gait of her early productions, while at the same time the references to her first touchstones (Siouxsie Sioux and Lydia Lunch) have blended in, though not disappeared, within a decor closer to the dreamy, liturgical atmospheres of Lisa Gerrard.

"Avalanche" (with strings played by Sean McCann and Ryan York) and the single "Vessel" ideally open the record onto a horizon without reference points, immersed in an osmotic space of eternal drama. Afterwards, electro and techno beats move through the likes of "Hikikomori", "Shivers" and "Ixode", defragmentations of the soul into more contorted, plastic forms, by which point the DIY, lo-fi attitude has been entirely shed.

The closing "Skin", with its pianistic drapery, and the nihilistic fury of "Collapse" move through the final seconds of the twilight of an intense record, hard to listen to lightly, rich with dense, interwoven nuances held together by a very strong aesthetic coherence. Conatus's conceptual vision left an uneven but significant mark on both music criticism and the scene around it, spawning numerous clones among the orphans of the Witch House sunset and fascinating unexpected artists, such as director David Lynch. He was about to release, almost at the same time, his first true solo debut under his own name, "Crazy Clown Time", and found in Zola Jesus's track "In Your Nature" an excellent starting point for a remix that altered the sound's intimate structure, converting it to a more guitar-driven, rust-worn approach. 


A certainly courageous choice that severs many ties with her original past and shows an artist capable of gathering and following the many clues and paths she finds along her way, absorbing them and growing alongside them.

If Conatus pointed the way, now it's up to Taiga, her first work released under the Mute banner, to follow that path all the way through, to reach, even to touch, those flashes of light that had illuminated the thick darkness surrounding Zola Jesus. And she must have truly glimpsed that light, even if just for an instant, judging by Danilova's own statements, in which she candidly claimed to consider this latest effort her actual debut. It's impossible to pin down exactly what lies behind such a weighty claim, but there's no doubt that the musician's determination to look ahead, heedless of her own past and of the "legacy" she has built over her entire career, is at the very least admirable: a stubbornness capable of overcoming boundaries and legitimate (or not) expectations, projecting herself forward in search of an audience she has never before pursued with such desire. A course correction, then, more communicative than strictly musical: and yet, quite a few chickens as home to roost upon listening to a work that largely fails to meet the goals it set for itself.

"Dangerous Days" (written for the previous album, in any case), lead single from this fourth effort, seemed to make clear that the path traced out by "Vessel" and "Seekir" — minimal, electro-pop pulse and a bright gift for melody — wouldn't just be a one-off parenthesis to be filed away once the project was done. Even "Dust", with its ambition to reshape the curves of r&b in the light of the theatrical shadings of her voice, stands out, all things considered, as a track that in a hypothetically different sequencing would undoubtedly have held its own. The problems arise when tackling the rest of the collection's tracks, where what prevails is overload, a haphazard pile-up of ideas lacking any real sense of planning, united by a sense of bloated grandeur that completely sinks whatever little manages to stand out in the songwriting. Rather than on the melodies — ultimately the main element in an album that wants to call itself pop — attention shifts to everything else: the production, polished to perfection, the arrangements, bolstered even by a full orchestral section (which at times might even dare to look up toward the dizzying madrigals of Sam Rosenthal), as well as a pervasive ambience achieved through scattered vocal effects. So much sonic richness, such a considerable deployment of solutions and devices, which on one hand often finds the right expressive path (the digital march of "Lawless", the chamber techno of "Hunger"), but on the other finds no support in a song form that's too frayed, often reduced to little more than a sketch, the idea of what it could/should be.

Paradoxically, in its break — so subversive compared to Stridulum — the underrated Conatus hit the mark with a precision and accuracy that Taiga can at best only dream of: going back to the excellent ideas of that record, rethinking and recalibrating them, could prove to be the winning move.

And it's precisely from those ideas that Okovi took its cue. With the project of storming the charts a miserable failure for Nika Roza Danilova, the return to the fold of Sacred Bones — the label that launched her, nurtured her and turned her into a first-rate star in the global dark firmament at the start of the decade — speaks to a substantial rethink of the direction to give her career, in every conceivable sense. It's evidenced by the cover art, decidedly less angelic and far less drenched in the black tar that completely covered her features back in the days of Stridulum, by a title in Slavic that translates to an unsettling "shackles, fetters", but above all by a decisive abandonment of the electro-pop asepsis that had marked her previous studio effort, in favour of recovering the pathos and the darker, more oppressive atmospheres of her early work. The result combines the languages the artist has touched on throughout her now decade-long career, channeling them into a feverish, intense collection that puts Zola Jesus back on an unexpectedly right path. It is anything but a minor achievement.

It should be made clear, however, that this backward glance carries no nostalgic connotation, no desire to return to her most artistically fortunate period. With her mind always fixed on the next move, on Okovi Danilova carries out a pop-leaning conversion (at times even straying into territory close to techno and dance) of the leaden, sinister settings of her first albums, combining them not only with the greater melodic accessibility acquired in recent years, but also with fuller, more full-bodied performances that reflect the author's classical training. In a work marked by a constant sense of pain and affliction, where the phrasing leans on the more emotional side of her voice, the songwriting — even with the occasional stumble — taps into a memorability built on towering refrains, constructions chiseled down to the millimetre, a management of sonic space able to hugely amplify the need for silence as well as the explosions of fullness, in a collection that in its own way succeeds in presenting Danilova in the most immediate, "popular" way possible.

Not that the emphasis has been drained away — quite the opposite: if anything, this is the musician's most lush and elaborate record, the one in which sonic detail carries weight sometimes even greater than everything else. In this sense, Zola Jesus's lyrical vocals, aware of the drama simmering within the dense lyrical content of the songs, find a perfect counterpart in the powerful string openings and the return of electronic textures bordering on industrial, which almost entirely dissolve the dance ambitions of her previous records. The approach becomes more intricate and fascinating, in a stylistic intersection that weds folk elements and a neoclassical attitude within an evocative electro-gothic setting. The result is powerful romances on which Danilova builds melodies worthy of her operatic training, but also seductive dark-pop motifs in which the expressive catatonia of Lana Del Rey is transformed into a crucible of fascinating chamber pads and dry industrial-hip-hop beats (the fine single "Soak", a sort of lavish update of the aseptic aesthetic first presented on Conatus), as well as imposing symphonies in which the instrumental section evolves and shatters against itself, between powerful chamber staccatos and sudden jolts of electricity, for a fascinating clash-encounter between worlds.

Despite personal and family troubles that put her through a far from easy period of her life, it seems the worst is now behind her, and that new energy has begun feeding Nicole Hummel's creative wellspring, who — despite the shackles decried by the title — has rediscovered an expressive freedom and a courage long since lost. While a few lapses in the writing still remain, Okovi nonetheless reknits the threads of a path that seemed to have been lost for good, bringing the name Zola Jesus and her unsettling dark soul back into the spotlight. For now, one can be more than satisfied.

The new album Arkhon (2022) arrives after a long break of a full five years of creative crisis. The Zola Jesus project now seems inexorably headed toward territory that's, on the whole, not very interesting, never fully betraying its original dark leanings but drifting a bit too close to the border of pop entertainment music. The album goes by without a hitch, amid dream and darkwave moments where the lovely singing is perhaps the only element really worth highlighting.

There would seem to be three songs worth mentioning, namely the three chosen as singles. The dark incantation of "Lost", lo-fi goth stripped down to the barest possible instrumentation; the intro of "The Fall" which — with its few piano notes — evokes genuinely gothic atmospheres before lifting off into a spot-on dark-pop melody; and finally "Desire", for voice and piano alone. The latter is a track that any mainstream pop singer would kill to have in their own discography. Despite its hit potential (someone else could have turned it into an inescapable radio anthem), Nika Roza Danilova manages to personalize it in a way that still feels perfectly coherent on a dark LP, making it without doubt the record's most lucid moment.

As for the rest, Arkhon slips by harmlessly without anything truly memorable, with professional production and plenty of craft, but ultimately little real inspiration.

Contributors: Vassilios Karagiannis ("Taiga", "Okovi"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("Arkhon")