Zola Jesus’ Pop Reconstruction

Nika Roza Danilovabegan ordering voice lesson tapes from the ads in the back of Rolling Stone at age seven. As a child living on a hundred acres of woods in Wisconsin, the only voice teacher she could find specialized in opera. Danilova, who is just four feet eleven inches tall, “liked the idea of utilizing your body in a way that makes you sound so much bigger than yourself,” she tells Kurt Andersen.

Danilova invented the performing name Zola Jesusback in high school. “All my friends were in bands,” she explains, “and I was this girl making solo music with a keyboard. I wanted a name to make it feel more like a band.” She took the first name from the French novelist Emile Zola and Jesus from Jesus Christ. “There was a dichotomy — Zola was for truth and Jesus was for spirituality.” But, she adds, “Honestly, I liked how it sounded.”

Just 25 years old, Danilova has just released her sixth album as Zola Jesus, Taiga. It’s the Russian word for boreal forest, which refers to both her ethnicity and the frigid northern woods she was raised in. Danilova’s previous records have blended rock with noise and electronica in songs about pain and struggle, classic Goth territory — she’s been labeled “gloom pop.” But Taiga has an upbeat sound and catchy hooks that wouldn’t feel out of place in the Top 40.

“I just thought it would be interesting to try to communicate the same paranoia, the same nihilism with something that felt more productive,” she explains. “In the past I wrote pop music, it just had a lot of noise over the top — I liked taking a song that could be a pop song and destroying it.” Six records in, Danilova felt it was time to for a change. “You keep deconstructing and, at some point, you can’t deconstruct any more. You need to reconstruct.”

Bonus Track: “Go (Blank Sea)”