The Aural Explorations of Zsela

There’s an innate magnetism to Zsela Thompson that’s palpable if you’ve heard her music or witnessed her presence or even just caught a glimpse of her. She seems to be an unmissable figure these days, present wherever culture manifests in its richest and timeliest forms. It was only a few weeks prior to our conversation last fall that she performed at the Mother Daughter Holy Spirit runway show fundraiser for the Trans Justice Funding Project, for example, where a mix of creatives lent their talent for a moment of celebration, visibility, and action. “That was special because I was supposed to leave [New York] and they hit me up about it, and it was really last minute, but I just knew I wanted to be a part of it,” she explains. “I feel really lucky.” But that’s how it goes with Zsela (who performs mononymously); she attracts some of the most respected, unique creators, and in turn finds a constant source of inspiration and collaboration in her growing community. However, it’s her music that pulls people in closer than anything else. Intimate and unflinching, her songs invite listeners into her carefully crafted world, one that she’s about to crystallize in a new way.

It’s all part of the artist’s creative evolution, which has occurred rapidly in the few years since she began releasing music and emerging in the public eye. For one, she’s become more visually expressive; her sense of style has become bolder and more fantastical, and she often wears custom pieces made by her network of coveted fashion friends. Her confident persona and willingness to be playful and ever-changing æsthetically have made her a muse to designers like Colleen Allen (whose creations Cero Magazine captured on her earlier this year) and Claire Sullivan, the latter of whom befriended and collaborated with the musician early when she launched her brand. “She made this custom piece for this show I did at The Getty,” Thompson recalls. “It was crazy, I had this ‘mothical’ theme, a term I coined for it. That’s why I have the wings. I have the song ‘Moth Dance,’ literally I said I want it to be ‘mothical,’ and she came up with this crazy look.”

But it’s the fluid nature of Thompson’s sound that points to the inner workings behind the alluring persona. In her one-off performances in New York last spring, her voice sounded as warm and frictionless as ever. “I had sent [musician and producer Bryndon Cook] my first demo of ‘Noise,’ my first song in 2017, and he sent it to me today. And it was shocking. My voice is so different,” she recalls. That voice has been her main instrument, rarely altered with effects, and never jostling for space alongside tight percussion and chords that sometimes oscillate gently throughout a track and sometimes are played loose and freeform. For shows, she often performs with only one guitarist alongside her (Cook at the Mother Daughter Holy Spirit benefit and Cole Berliner in her subsequent shows throughout the summer), which is in keeping with her sound. She sings in a low, punctuated voice, and the words feel like they are coming from deep within her. The effect, on both her 2020 Ache of Victory EP and her debut album Big For You from 2024, works to accentuate her tone and create a merger of neo-soul and pop. “I’m learning so much about my voice,” she says. “Especially from the EP, on this album, I got very experimental with my voice and pushing my voice and seeing that. It’s just so endless where you go with a voice. I think [Big For You] started to itch this thing that I feel like I’m now fully invested in, exploring the voice itself. Even these songs that I’m writing now, it feels like another direction of my voice.”

That direction is also informed by the feelings she engaged with on her prior releases. In its sixteen-minute runtime over five measured tracks, Ache of Victory was a deeply emotional exercise for Thompson. “My first EP was so wrapped up in so much pain, and to get from that level of pain to the joy I was trying to do on Big For You, that ‘trying’ was a long journey. Now I feel like there’s a little bit less baggage because I made an album that was in that journey, and now hopefully there’s a bit more ease.” Big For You also sought to expand her sonic range, offering more varied rhythms to achieve a sense of levity that was absent in the EP. “I was listening to this Björk podcast where she’s talking about the debut album, and there’s all this emphasis on all the different things you want people to know, like ‘I can be like this’ and ‘I can be like that.’ I felt that with the album, there was a big emphasis on the diversity of sounds. I think we did that. We did the dynamics of tension and release, and each song being in different worlds, and now I’m less interested in that. I feel more interested in one world.”

Though that world hasn’t revealed itself just yet, the prospect of adding a new layer to the depths she’s already proven capable of reaching is enough to create anticipation. What’s clear is that she has the space to look inward and find something new within herself. “I’ve just started to love [living in Los Angeles], and the thing that I think is so cool about it—and what can be so hard about it—is how much you’re faced with yourself,” she says. “It can be isolating, but you just have to really work for community in a different way than I’m used to from growing up [in New York]. But it’s also beautiful, the growth that you can have with yourself in that city. It lends itself to introspection.“

It’s a stark contrast to the experience she has in her native New York, where she often returns for performances, photo shoots, or fashion events, or just to soak up the energy that’s so familiar to her. It’s chaotic, but in a strange way, it matches the chaos of the world right now, and that’s when she feels most inspired to create. “Even being playful in this time feels like a reaction or resistance to the hard times that we’re in,” she says. “We need to still have joy. This lightness that I feel in making this music right now, it’s been giving me a lot of life, with the contrast of what’s going on.” She thinks there will always be an element of heaviness that she feels in the world and will channel in her songs, but she’s still maintaining a sense of joy in the process of creating. The result can only be further clarity in the world she’s building and the depths she’s seeking. For those of us listening, that magnetic appeal will only get stronger.

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