Zola Jesus

Operatically trained as a child, Nika Roza Danilova’s voice is so strong she should have to carry a permit for the thing. Thankfully, she puts it to great use with her gloomy anthems in Zola Jesus. On Taiga, her latest record and first for Mute, she experiments more with clean production and pure pop forms than she has before. But she’s always in love with the heaviest experimental sounds, and the way those two tendencies grate up against each other and work within one another is why you should always see her perform. She’s almost a midwestern version of Björk.