There’s been an awful lot of excited talk about Iona Zajac’s debut album, Bang, in the last few months. The Glaswegian hasn’t hurried into the studio: her skills have been honed first and foremost as a live performer whose recent support slots have included The Pogues, Alison Moyet, Mercury Rev, Arab Strap and Lankum. Keeping big-name company seems to have left Zajac with a penchant for the grand musical gesture. Early singles Anton and Bang – and their eyecatching videos – marked her out as a songwriter with important things to say and a willingness to say them loudly and with a laser-like focus.
As the album’s lead single and title track, Bang quickly became both a statement of intent and a calling card. A fiercely feminist celebration of sex and pointed rebuff to the insidious culture of slut-shaming, it plays on both the literal and euphemistic meanings of its title. There’s almost a dream-pop sheen to the verses before the crunching chords and percussive thrust of the chorus. It is – if you’ll excuse the pun – an absolute banger. Anton is a slower burn. A nagging guitar, an insistent melody, and then a build and release as Zajac’s quiet vocals spiral out of control into pained shrieks and impassioned howls. Like much of this album, Anton touches on themes of abuse and misogyny, and the moments of rupture that appear in many of the songs serve as spaces where Zajac can break out of traditional feminine roles.
Those traditional expectations exist in music, as in life. Female singer-songwriters are supposed to fit into neat little boxes, to write pretty, quirky little songs. But Zajac is part of a long line of upsetters, a lineage that includes PJ Harvey and Fiona Apple, women who are determined to show that femininity comes in many forms. It can be quiet and pretty, or messy and loud, and Zajac is adept at flitting between those modes with the maximum of dramatic effect. On Salt, she displays a Sibylle Baier-like folk minimalism, before the clipped percussion emerges to bestow a sense of tightness and toughness. Elsewhere, she embraces a surreal and dreamlike humour: Chicken Supermarket sees her cavorting, high on mushrooms, with Billy Connolly.
But all of these elements – all the absurdism and the seriousness – work together in service of Zajac’s primary concern: that complete freedom of creative expression is what makes us human, and is an inalienable right that should be – but often, still, isn’t – granted to women in creative roles. Indeed, that creativity can often be stifled by violence: its threat, its implication, its physical reality. Zajac meets it head on with tracks like Bowls, the album opener, which creeps darkly into existence with a moody alt-rock atmosphere and confronts an abusive antagonist with the repeated question: ‘Will you stop it before bodies break?’ The equally brooding Dilute is the sound of resistance in the face of a stifling relationship; its imagery owes as much to fiction writers like Angela Carter as it does to Zajac’s fellow songwriters.
Zajac is unafraid of periodically giving in to atavistic urges. The wordless cries at the centre of the ostensibly gentle Summer speak of wildness, perhaps the wildness that can come about as a result of grief or neglect. But instead of treating these emotions as something alien, something to be overcome or pushed aside, she embraces them, and the results are frequently gripping. End of the Year seems at first to be a celebration of the joys of being young and alive, but it contains hidden, dark corners and unexpected turns. The fact that the hope remains at the song’s end is testament to Zajac’s impressive ability to traverse complex and ambiguous emotions.
Zajac’s music is the perfect match for her lyrical worlds. The vintage-sounding guitar lines that run through The Murder Mystery give the song a deliciously snaky, unpindownable feel and make the surprise of its closing screech even more potent. The softly plucked strings of Ridiculous Hat act as a kind of velvet glove, beckoning you towards the album’s conclusion, which comes in the form of the extraordinarily raw, honest and starkly beautiful Loving Is Rough. Though swathed in droning synths and augmented by a choir of wordless voices, Zajac’s fragile piano and clear, uncompromising singing remain at the forefront.
Bang’s songs are songs of experience, and sometimes that experience is bitter and tough. Zajac’s gift is alchemising that bitterness and toughness into great art without ever sanitising it. Her debut album is a remarkably accomplished achievement.
Bang (November 21st, 2025) Self Released
Bandcamp: https://ionazajac.bandcamp.com/album/bang-2