Zola Jesus

Zola Jesus doesn’t make it all that easy to separate the voice from the mystique. The Madison, Wisconsin project’s 23-year-old diminutive mastermind goes by the name of Nika Roza Danilova, and first gained notice pairing the full-throated, shuddering romance of her vocals with briny, industrial-pop production. She put out the album The Spoils and a busy flurry of EPs and 7-inches over just a couple short years. Her 2011 full-length, Conatus, builds on the singer’s ethereal aura, with tracks like “Vessel” simultaneously soaring to mist-ringed mountaintops and plodding through rainy, grey cityscapes. It’s a consistently haunting and beautiful record, and an endlessly promising sign of good things to come in the future from this Midwestern nymph, like collaborations with David Lynch and M83.

Updated 04/30/2012