On the cover of her fifth studio album, Zola Jesus is drenched in a similar viscous substance that obscured her face on the sleeve to her 2010 Stridulum EP. Okovi, named with a word that means “shackles” in most Slavic languages, also marks a return to Sacred Bones, the Brooklyn label that nurtured the singer and producer in her early years and on which she’s released all her albums except for 2014’s Taiga, which came out on Mute. Zola Jesus, also known as Nika Roza Danilova, said three years ago that she hoped Taiga would break through to pop radio, climb the Billboard charts, and unpin Zola Jesus from her goth-pop niche. None of that happened; Zola Jesus has still only grazed the Billboard 200 by way of her feature on M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, but the abandonment of her Top 40 aspirations has yielded some of her most powerful music since that Stridulum EP and its sternum-cracking single “Night.”
Since Taiga’s release, Danilova experienced multiple brushes with death: Someone close to her was diagnosed with cancer, a close friend attempted suicide twice, and she herself felt pulled by depression’s gravity. Okovi threads these stories together in both oblique and direct retellings. Danilova yearns “to keep that knife from you” on the mournful, string-based “Witness”; on its punchier sequel “Siphon,” she insists, “We’d rather clean the blood of a living man...we’d hate to see you give into those cold dark nights inside your head.” These direct appeals to suicidal loved ones conjure an urgency that Zola Jesus’s more abstract ruminations on death tended to lack. While Taiga often sacrificed specificity in favor of power—“Dangerous Days” orbited darkness without ever clarifying its source—Okovi’s dramas are hard to miss.
Even explicitly fictional narratives like “Soak,” in which Danilova sings as a woman choosing to kill herself rather than be murdered, resonate with the album’s broader themes. Over a beat and cello combo that recalls Dido’s “Here With Me,” Danilova ventures into death in character, drowning herself in the tradition of Ophelia and Virginia Woolf. The gesture, a synecdoche for feminine madness, feels like Danilova’s attempt to externalize her longing for death, to plug it into an archetype far older than she is. As she inhabits the classical scene of a woman drowning, some of the weight of her own ideation seems to lift. Death’s a lot lighter when you’re seeing it on a stage or behind museum glass than when you’re carrying it around in your marrow.
As much as Danilova finds relief in history, it also prompts anxiety on the galloping “Veka,” whose goth, night-ready beat takes some of the air out of her unanswerable questions about legacy. “Who will you find you/When all you are is dust?/Who will find you/In centuries?” she asks, gently echoing Percy Shelley's poem “Ozymandias” and its illustration of the futility of building anything to last. Without that beat, “Veka” might have landed as a facile complaint about the uselessness of making art; as a body-moving banger, though, it prioritizes the here and now over the vague horizon of a world some centuries into the future. Who cares who digs up our bones as long as we can use them to dance while we’re alive?
The cover of Okovi differs from Stridulum’s cover in one pointed way: Rather than being slicked over, Danilova’s eyes have been cleared of the muck that otherwise covers her. She looks just slightly left of the camera, her eyes dark and calm, unbothered. Upon closer inspection, you can see she’s not actually drowning in the oil; instead, it looks like it’s been applied to a photograph of her that’s been re-photographed. There are brush strokes around her face, and the sharpness of the circles exposing her eyes makes the stuff look more like a mask she’s chosen to wear rather than something used to tar her. Maybe Zola Jesus is still carrying the same slime that’s weighed her down for years, but at least she can see clearly through it now. For all its dark signifiers, all its grapplings with death, Okovi leans towards the light.
