“I was delusional as a kid,” Zola Jesus remarked in an interview with Pitchfork. “I never spent a lot of time around other people my own age.” Born and raised in Wisconsin, Nika Roza Danilova has come a long way since her isolated childhood to become Zola Jesus. Since recording her debut album, The Spoils, in her University of Wisconsin-Madison apartment in ’09, she has toured internationally. After dropping her much-anticipated LP Taiga last month, Zola Jesus is in the spotlight. Like her other albums, Taiga evokes the harsh realities of the wilderness and of isolation; its slight instrumental dissonance and uneven rhythms keeps it just a little unsettling, gritty, and real. Though Taiga blends pop with Zola Jesus’s signature experimental edge, it lies on the fringe for the mainstream circuit because it captures the dark mystery of Danilova’s upbringing.

In Taiga, Zola Jesus moves away from the style in her last album, titled Versions. The latter is a collection of minimalist tracks that highlights her powerful voice amidst beautiful, small string ensembles. The rich quartet breaks found in “Hikikomori,” “Fall Back,” and “Sea Talk” have been replaced with pulsating dance beats and anthem-esque choruses in Taiga. But Zola Jesus stays true to her love of strings. Bursts of sweeping orchestras move in sync with her arching voice in “Hunger,” “Lawless,” and “Ego.” And though Taiga is more mainstream than her previous work, it manages to preserve Zola Jesus’s quirkiness.

“Hunger” may be one of the strongest tracks on the album and, according to Danivola, it is “the theme of the record.” The song opens with repeating brass riffs and slips into beautiful chaos as Danilova’s voice starts to dance over the disorder. It’s a battle she doesn’t seem to be winning to fight. Right as Zola Jesus belts out, “I got the hunger, I got the hunger in my veins / I won’t surrender, still it takes me away,” her voice is pulled into the distance, fading in volume before it slowly builds up again for another push at existence. The brass finally overpowers Danivola as her voice echoes away before finally letting go. Her vocal tone and volume roll up and down, just like in “Go (Blank Sea),” the variations sculpting grand peaks and valleys like a force of nature; as both songs end, Taiga’s magnificence gives way to the bare expanses of tundra, while sound slowly dissipates.

As Zola Jesus describes in the album commentary, “‘Dangerous Days’ was an exercise in combining an abstract paranoia with an upbeat dance song.” In some ways, this track serves as Zola Jesus’s break into the modern pop sphere. If any song on Taiga has the chance, the repetitive dance beat and melodic chorus on “Dangerous Days” make it a clear contender. But the dance beat sometimes breaks into uneven chaos and the melodic strings and brass clash in uneasy dissonance, reflecting the “abstract paranoia” Zola Jesus mentioned. Though it may not be perky enough for a Top-40 chart, it definitely sounds like Zola Jesus. She stays true to her sound, her vision, and herself. And that’s something to be appreciated in its own right.

“Growing up in a hundred acres of woods, I didn’t have TV or internet. [That was] the reality of learning about yourself [in the countryside],” Zola Jesus said in an interview with the L.A. Record. That’s exactly what Taiga sounds like—being surrounded by towering forests deep in introspection, but not in an idealistic or romanticized way. Zola Jesus carves elegant mountains and lush valleys with her voice, painting a scene so isolated there isn’t even cell reception (gasp). But the scene is so picturesque that you might not even find yourself grasping for your phone every other minute. You can just sit there and take it all in.