Artist Profile

Zola Jesus

Label:
Agent: Greg Lowe

Zola Jesus is Nika Roza Danilova, a 21-year old vocalist from Madison, Wisconsin currently juggling university – she’s winding up an undergraduate degree in French and philosophy – with being one of the most remarkable and talented young musicians of the era.

Nika’s musical career began at the age of 10, when she studied opera and applied to New York’s prestigious Juilliard School. Her application was denied, but when Danilova reinvented herself as Zola Jesus in high school and started to record songs in her bedroom, that voice re-emerged. 2009’s The Spoils, released on Sacred Bones, unfurled an epic sort of gloom-pop deliberately tarnished with lo-fidelity scuzz, but songs like ‘Clay Bodies’ rose above the rubble thanks to Nika’s huge delivery, full-hearted and powerful in a way that that melds a familiar diva dynamic to an abrasiveness practiced by scream queens like Diamanda Galas and Lydia Lunch.

Zola Jesus has one heel in noise music: recently reissued is her highly recommended split album with fellow Wisconsin musician Clay Ruby, aka “horror electronics” practitioner Burial Hex. Her new EP Stridulum, however, strips away a lot of the scuzz, and it’s little short of a revelation. Cool, bottomless synths and crashing, martial drums tether down six commanding songs about love and death that filter up to the gods. It’s perhaps lame and reductive to pose it, but Zola Jesus reminds me of a young Joanna Newsom, in a way; classically trained, but contortion her formal musical understanding into an experimental, intensely personal vision with imagination to burn.

Nika probably should have been studying or something, but she was good enough to take an evening out to answer some questions about transgressive art, writing love songs, and what a goth does when goth comes into vogue.

- bio by The Quietus