“Zola Jesus began a couple years after I stopped singing,” Nika Danilova recently told True Endeavors. “During the hiatus I went through a really dark period; very depressed and felt a loss of self-worth.”

While “Clay Bodies” off of her newly-released LP The Spoils explores the muddled, disorienting landscape of depression, its lo-fi production introduces a wryness not normally present in strictly goth music.

Were you to untangle this track from its own disorientation and clean it up, Zola Jesus might bear a likeness to PJ Harvey: her soaring warble definitely attests to that. But you can’t understand her lyrics, and so her voice takes on the quality of an un-tuned instrument, perhaps, if the imagination permits, one excavated from an anthropological dig. The production follows in pursuit of perfection via imperfection: it is so muddled as to give the impression of inchoate and not entirely identifiable sounds, contributing to the mood. The presence of a dissonant vocal melody, low keyboard riff and cryptic theme certainly do pull from goth’s closet, but in place of a white cosmetic face, you have a bodies caked in clay. [Pitchfork]