Drama is Nika Danilova’s friend. On last year’s Okovi, her best record yet, the artist better known as Zola Jesus took all of her dark, operatic, goth-tinged pop and twisted it around her fingers, pulling in strings and synths and her unmistakable voice to create something balladic and affecting. But beneath the production wizardry, her songs have always stood on their own. So, for the latest in the Noisey Acoustics series with Jansport, we took Danilova and her keyboard to an intersection in the middle of Boston where played a stripped-down version of “Soak.” It seemed to calm the city down for a few minutes. Watch that at the top of the page.
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