Zola Jesus Arkhon (Vinyl)

There is a way a voice can cut through the fascia of reality, cleaving through habit into the raw nerve of experience.Nika Roza Danilova, the singer, songwriter, and producer who since 2009 has released music asZola Jesus, wields a voice that does that. When you hear it, it is like you are being summoned to a place that’s already wrapped inside you but obscured from conscious experience. This place has been buried because it tends to hold pain, but it’s also a gift, because once it’s opened, once you’re inside of it, it can show you the truth.

Zola Jesus‘new albumArkhonfinds new ways of loosing this submerged, stalled pain. On previous albums,Danilovahad largely played the role of auteur, meticulously crafting every aspect of the act’ssound and look. This time, she realised that her habitual need for control was sealing her out of her art.ArkhonseesZola Jesus first collaboration with producerRandall Dunn(Sunn O))),Earth,Mandysoundtrack,Candymansoundtrack), and with drummer and percussionistMatt Chamberlain, whose prior work appears on albums byFiona Apple,Bob Dylan, andDavid Bowie.

Arkhonruns the spectrum from songs whose weight lies in their bare simplicity, like‘Desire’, an elegiac piano composition about the end of a relationship that was recorded acoustically in a single take, to towering, groove-oriented tracks like‘The Fall’and the tight, interlocking percussion and samples of a Slovenian folk choir in‘Lost’, which propel narratives of collective despair and mutual comfort in kind. Through these turns,Arkhonreveals itself as an album whose power derives from abandon. Both its turmoils and its pleasures take root in the body, letting individual consciousness dissolve into the thick of the beat.

Despite the darkness curled inside reality, there is power, too, in surrendering to what can’t be pinned down, to the wild unfurling of the world in all its unforeseeable motion. That letting go is the crux ofArkhon, which marks a new way of moving and making forZola Jesus.

Tracklisting:

1. Lost
2. The Fall
3. Undertow
4. Into the Wild
5. Dead and Gone
6. Sewn
7. Desire
8. Fault
9. Efemra
10. Do That Anymore

Release date:May 20, 2022