Zola Jesus is a genre-defying artist who combines avant-garde sounds with darkwave song structure, gothic imagery, and a powerful, classically-trained voice. She’s just revealed the details of her next studio album, which will be called Arkhon. It’s due out May 20.
Arkhon will be her first studio album in five years. It follows Okovi, a dark and emotionally wrenching opus about loss that was among my favorite albums of 2017. Okovi includes the songs “Exhumed” and “Soaked.”
Along with the announcement, Zola Jesus shared the album’s first track, “Lost.” The song contains samples of a Slovenian folk choir.
Here’s what the press notes say about the album:
Arkhon unearths buried tools for bearing grief, loss, and disappointment. The album’s title means “power” or “ruler” in ancient Greek, but it also has a specific valence within Gnosticism. “Arkons are a Gnostic idea of power wielded through a flawed god,” says Nika Roza Danilova (Zola Jesus). “They taint and tarnish humanity, keeping them corrupted instead of letting them find their harmonious selves. I do feel like we are living in an arkhonic time; these negative influences are weighing extremely heavy on all of us. We’re in a time of arkhons. There’s power in naming that.”
You can pre-order Arkhon at Bandcamp and Amazon.
Arkhon tracklisting
- Lost
- The Fall
- Undertow
- Into The Wild
- Dead and Gone
- Sewn
- Desire
- Fault
- Efemra
- Do That Anymore
