“Soak” follows “Exhumed” as the second new track from Wisconsin singer and producer Zola Jesus’ forthcoming fifth album Okovi (out on September 8, via Sacred Bones Records), which was recorded after Jesus returned to her childhood home by the woods to grieve the loss of several individuals who were very close to her. It’s a powerful showcase of Nika Roza Danilova’s opera-trained vocals, her characteristic predilection for dark lyrical themes (okovi is the Slavic word for shackles) and her expansive, ancient-sounding goth-industrial sonicscape.
The track evokes the urgent drama of a Greek tragedy, striking the listener with a climactic sense of fatalism, doom and a vague sense of redemption. The lyric 'Take me to the water’ suggests spiritual redemption, but Jesus appears to be eagerly anticipating her own doom: ‘Let me soak in slaughter/ I will sink into the bed like a stone’. Jesus has explained that the song was written from the perspective of the victim of a serial killer, who paradoxically embraces her imminent death instead of collapsing into self-pity and helplessness:
“I was thinking about this crucial moment inside the victim's mind, when she knows she's going to die. She thinks back at her life and the futility of the decisions she made, when, in the end her life would be cut short against her will. What's the point of trying to navigate life if you don't even get to choose how it ends? Instead of letting her fate be determined by someone else, she takes back control and turns it around, so instead, in her mind, she is choosing to die. She lets the killer assist her in suicide, as she gets tossed into the water and slowly drowns. Through writing this song the story evolved within me, and I saw how it mirrored my own feelings inside."
Jesus' extratextual explanation helps us make sense of the line ‘You should know I would never let you down’, which indicates an unusual complicity in her own demise. There’s a potent cathartic quality to her vocal performance, backed by the track’s atmospheric snares and mid-tempo pace. As promised, Jesus has achieved the rare feat of marrying a hard-won sense of hope with the inevitability of grave personal loss: “This album is a deeply personal snapshot of loss, reconciliation, and a sympathy for the chains that keep us all grounded to the unforgiving laws of nature”.
