Scottish singer-songwriter Iona Zajac cut her teeth as one half of the folk duo Avocet before launching her solo career in 2022. Her debut EP, Find Her in the Grass, saw her add the guitar to her original instrument, the Clarsach harp, as she started to experiment with her musical identity. The time she’s spent on the road the past couple of years with the likes of Mercury Rev, Arab Strap and Cassandra Jenkins has given her the chance to continue perfecting her craft and develop an assertive voice. While touring, she also gathered material for her debut LP, Bang, where she turns trauma and anger into a cathartic and exhilarating celebration of womanhood.
Centring on the abuse of women, Bang is not for the faint-hearted. Zajac reflects on toxic relationships and domestic violence, facing the hurt head-on without ever flinching. “Will you stop it before bodies break?” she asks in the atmospheric opener, “Bowls”, before her chanting lends a ritualistic quality to the song, bringing Patti Smith’s “Ghost Dance” to mind. The track sounds ominous throughout, and you almost breathe a sigh of relief when the music stops around the four-minute mark. Alas, the end is still about 50 seconds away and that final stretch pummels you with some ferocious, crashing noise. Both bowls and bodies are breaking for now.
With the exception of album highlight “Anton” mid-way through the record, you’re spared from such violent outbursts – that track builds steadily as, hearing lines like “So I came and then I went / 'Go fuck yourself, go learn to get consent'", you brace yourself for an eruption that eventually arrives in the form of Zajac’s primal screams amidst a cacophony of sounds – but the rest of the songs are too filled with profound emotions. “Dilute”, based on her experiences as a teenager, though leisurely and understated, has a dark, ominous undercurrent and a vocal delivery that is vulnerable, defiant, hopeful and full of hurt all at once. Similarly, “Summer” starts out like a gorgeous classical piece arranged for the guitar, but then its spectral folk stylings give you chills and, later still, the song transports you to the Scottish Highlands, where you can no longer tell the difference between the haunting vocals and the howling of the wind.
Though full of sparse and sombre moments, Bang also offers plenty of humour and lightness. In “Chicken Supermarket”, Zajac may have Portishead’s Beth Gibbons’ ethereal delivery, but she lets her subconscious place her in weird situations neither she nor you expect, such as taking magic mushrooms with her fellow Scot Billy Connolly and swimming in a sea of jelly. The surrealist narratives and dream sequences she has logged over the years bring some brightness and when they do, you often end up with exuberant indie pop tunes.
“A celebration of sex for the sake of sex,” as the artist describes it, the title track is uptempo guitar music complete with tambourine and a chorus that is surprisingly catchy, considering that the words read “I’ll bang the head off you / Just to beat the blues”. Also, who would expect a song called “Murder Mystery” to show off infectious guitar tones and a pop sensibility that originated in the sixties? Think Marianne Faithfull singing a Gene Clark-penned number in 1965. Then again, contemporary artists like Angel Olsen also spring to mind. Indeed, listening to Bang, you may well find yourself taking stock of all the musicians, past and present, whose work resembles Zajac’ debut album and vice versa.
You can add the unheralded German folk singer Sibylle Baier and PJ Harvey to the list; two artists who might not have a lot in common at first sight, but whose music has prompted Zajac to incorporate many shades and moods into the album. What stays with you, though, after the organ fades away at the end of the record’s emotive climax “Loving Is Rough”, where her cadence is layered with a chorus of female voices woven together, is the unwavering resilience that courses through Bang. Utterly personal and heavily loaded, the record will appeal to many young women who share her experiences, empowering them in the process. And it will also appeal to everyone who believes that an artist’s responsibility goes beyond entertainment. Bang is a great album, but more crucially, it’s an important one.
