ZORA’s BELLAdonna is an Inexhaustible Reverie of Sexual Freedom and Razor-Sharp Verbiage
On her sophomore release, the Minnesota rapper, singer and producer places a wreath of macabre, femme fatale bon mots and in-your-face, pyrotechnic instrumentals onto a pop lexicon sorely in need of a stupefying makeover.

The work of ZORA arrived in my inbox last summer—a download of “HUSH,” the then-brand-new, delightfully catchy single marking her second effort with the always bang-on Get Better Records (Empty Country, Flung, Pouty). “HUSH” wasn’t just a turning point for the Minnesotan, it was a “hello” doused in hard-hitting finesse; it sounded like the closest anyone has ever gotten to making a Beyoncé song produced by SOPHIE. The song tells a story about toxic love, as ZORA gets candid about a man who doesn’t want to get caught with her in public. “I know we shouldn’t probably take this no further,” she sings. “But you beat the pussy up like no other.” You wouldn’t dare forget a line that cooks that hot.
Collaging an ‘80s-style R&B sample that she wrote and recorded herself with a syrup of 808s and hi-hats, “HUSH” had charting energy without sacrificing its resounding sense of underground glamor. ZORA’s production fills out the song’s shape with timeless soul and glitchy hooks. While “FASTLANE” was our first taste of what would become her new record, BELLAdonna, in 2023 (“You just the intermission, bitch I’m the full show” was an apt opening chapter), “HUSH” became ZORA’s bonafide coming out party to a fresh audience—establishing her as, dare I say, one of the most exciting pop figures in the Midwest.
ZORA was a classically trained pianist in her youth, taking up a dense mantle of skilled players in her family. She has a background in opera and theater, and her dad would bring her along to parties where he was deejaying. She went to Berklee and put out a mixtape at age 18, headlining the Meet the Ground Festival just two years later. Her first record, Z1, was a plentiful introduction full of alt-rock crusades, but its music and storytelling felt further away from the camera lens and closer to emulation. For it, she learned how to play the electric guitar, because she wanted to be Prince. On BELLAdonna, ZORA raps, sings and arranges—she is but a triplicate of profundity, her classical background poking through in symphonic bursts but succeeding most in the ecosystem of copy-and-pasted, dense production she lays out on every track of her so-called “operetta.”
ZORA has spoken before about finding influence for BELLAdonna while recovering from a sexual assault at a club. These 16 songs are 16 challenging gestures; the album is a biome of bag-chasing, G-spots and the fantasies lingering in-between, X-rated revenge tales draped in the scandalous glint of nightlight. “I’m the gift that keeps on giving, lifetime guarantee, I’m the total package, give you everything you need,” ZORA delights on “VIDEOGURL,” her voice scattered across the hyper-active, chopped-up beats. On “THE BITCH IS BACK (Press),” Destiny Spikes raps about swallowing cum in a Tesla before shouting, “You bitches should be grateful, get to eat my dick for breakfast! Quiet on the set, bitch, I will never play fair.” No part of this album simply sits and waits.
It is important, then, that BELLAdonna arrives with the ferosity that it does—that it’s such a glitzy, club-bound text. There is so much self-preservation in the spaces of these songs, in the way these beats and synthesizers shoulder wounded vernaculars (“My body’s telling me to go to sleep, nah I’m too stressed out / We on a ship and it’s going down / To all my fam, my friends: I’m so lucky that I got you”). To listen to this record as not just a queer person, but as a non-binary person living in such adjacency to their trans siblings, it can be difficult to reckon with the monsters ZORA sings about—especially when those monsters become first-person recountings (“I had to die for new life”), or when the victims become mistaken for their tormentors. The masks blend into each other, the bodies fall into each other. It’s an apt illustration of a life in the shadow of trauma. ZORA is an “asthmatic with a vision” one minute and a “ghost you can’t escape” the next. But there is always relief on BELLAdonna; “Here’s how it feels to be alive,” she pronounces on the project-defining, Kurt Cavalheiro-assisted “tinytown.” And on the terrific “sick sex,” ZORA raps about riding a “backpack strap with the pink lipstick” like a ripstick and hits the “make it wet like oceans, play it like you own it” refrain with a calculated casualness.
“head2toe” is, to put it quickly, fucking incredible. It’s ZORA’s restorative document of joy and pleasure in the wake of sexual assault, as she turns “I am one of God’s favorites, can you fuck me?” and “By the way, I keep a pair of brass knuckles in my Telfy” into crucial parts of this album’s vocabulary. BELLAdonna is a document of Black trans life—a living, breathing ache of exploitation, trauma, violence and survival. “head2toe” especially dances through its own heaviness, as a flute-shaped backbeat contours ZORA’s call to arms: “I bet I can make it alright,” she declares, and you feel it everywhere. “My slime gon’ fuck me right, gon’ satisfy me from head to toe” will be a lyric we remember come list season in December, and perhaps beyond that, as well.
Side one of BELLAdonna is in all-caps, while side two exists in lowercase—matching the fluidity of the album’s climax and subsequent rest. “LUV LETTERS 2 MY STINK” is a woozy, bare-bones pyramid of verses where ZORA can flex her flow, in a no-frills cadence; “turn me out” pumps record scratches into the air while Myia Thornton drops a singing performance that wouldn’t sound out of place on a crunk&b interlude. The Prince guitar that defined Z1 isn’t totally absent, either; you can hear it in “THE BALLAD OF BELLADONNA” as it bridges the album’s halves, and ZORA even loops her chords into a mutated sample on “midnightmadness.” “sick sex” features guest vocals from social media names like Jaemy Paris and Duhgreatone, and the arrangement calls to mind the rhythms of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’s contributions to Janet Jackson’s 1980s canon. On the work-of-art chasm “BODIES IN MY ROOM,” the color palette expands as ZORA’s vocal bends into this Auto-Tuned free-fall of voices turning inside out.
The five-minute “ANGEL/GHOST” is ZORA’s big-screen fantasy—a Shakespeare-on-MDMA epic told in two gloriously disorienting parts. “ANGEL” is the verse-chorus-verse introduction, done up in exclamation points, rage-rock and “Suck this dick! Suck this dick! Suck this dick!” repetition that drops right into the Memphis-style horror-core of “GHOST,” which offers a disembodied kick: “You will not forget me, good luck trying to get rid of me.” But the sweetest moment on BELLAdonna comes at its conclusion, when “bye… for now :)” acts as a goodbye to the songs that came before it. ZORA acknowledges their titles, while a gloaming synth comes in and out of view. A hand presses down on the keys and the distortion unfurls into what I can only describe as an electronic infinity symbol. “Think I’m running outta time,” ZORA observes, before departing: “Aight, bye!”
Three years after Z1, BELLAdonna quakes with electronic impulses and colorful contrasts. It’s like a strobe light set to music, or an amalgamation of PC Music and the Neptunes. There is something plentiful here, in the neon-red of ZORA’s cinematic oasis—tones and tricks inspired by Three 6 Mafia, Children of the Corn tapes and the fruits of Abel Ferrara’s filmography. The songs tell a story of a sexual ecstasy ripped away but now regained, served up mixtape-style. This album stinks, sweats and shakes, vibrating in the calm of reclamation, answering machine messages that say “I love you” and clapping samples. ZORA places a wreath of macabre, femme fatale bon mots and in-your-face, pyrotechnic instrumentals onto a pop lexicon sorely in need of a stupefying makeover. It’s not a distracting engine, but one that fills the grandiose moments with even more flair—one that makes ZORA’s storytelling an inexhaustible reverie of sexual freedom and razor-sharp verbiage. Even in its greatest measures of pop jubilance, BELLAdonna does not rupture. It pulls you apart.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.