Hikikomori

Album: Conatus (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • Zola Jesus is the stage name of the Russian American singer/songwriter Nika Roza Danilova. She was raised in Merrill, Wisconsin on over 100 acres of forest and started singing early on, buying voice lesson tapes and opera sheet music at the age of 7. Danilova started performing opera when she was 10 years old, and in her teens she started to experiment in a more rock-orientated format. She said that by adopting a stage name after Jesus Christ and the French writer Émile Zola, she consciously wanted to alienate her peers. Danilova released her debut full-length album The Spoils in 2009, while studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
  • This track from her third album, Conatus, is named after the Japanese phenomenon of young people who can no longer cope with the demands of the outside world, and so go into self-imposed exile by shutting themselves in their apartments for years at a time. Danilova told NME: "It was about how, if I never left my house or my room, that'd be just fine by me."

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