Track by Track: Zora Jones - 50 Bullets To The Heart

For over a decade, Zora Jones has been one of electronic music's great world-builders - first through Fractal Fantasy alongside Sinjin Hawke, then through a solo catalogue that fuses sound, fashion and 3D-rendered visuals into fully immersive universes. Her 2018 debut album 'Ten Billion Angels' cemented her as one of the underground's most singular voices; now she returns with her sophomore full-length, '50 Bullets To The Heart', out today.

Where her debut dealt in maximalist fantasy, this new record turns inward. Moving through heartbreak, grief, lust, chronic pain and psychological recovery, Zora pulls from Miami bass, grime, crunk, Timbaland-era R&B and melancholic electronica to transform vulnerability into something physical and confrontational. It's an album about survival, and about club music itself as a tool for enduring what feels unendurable, first road-tested live at MUTEK Montreal with a self-devised AV show built from looped vocals, live keys and lighting rigged to glow from below.

Here, Zora walks us through the album, track by track.

1. Hurt

"I finally understood when they say that you learn more about love during a breakup than during a relationship, and that love alone isn’t enough."

2. 50 BULLETS

"'50 Bullets' to me is pain turned into power. It’s about seeing things clearly, trusting myself again and reclaiming my voice after a long period of fear, confusion and making myself really small. The main chords at the beginning come from a loop I made a while ago about which someone said “it’s not very good” - so turning it into my favorite song on the album felt symbolic in itself. A huge part of writing it was allowing myself to feel anger. For a long time, anger felt almost inaccessible to me, and this song gave me a means to release it. I’m someone who feels their emotions very physically, so the title comes from how I would describe the pain I experienced during two emotional breakdowns the previous winter, comparable to being shot with 50 bullets to the heart. In the song, I flip that image around. The final line is “but I shoot 50 bullets right back at you.” For me, that moment isn’t about revenge, it’s about refusing to absorb everything quietly. The song became a vow to myself: not to bend, not to make myself small, and not to abandon myself again. If someone makes you feel scared, not enough, too much, or dims your light: fuck them.

Musically, it sits somewhere between pop and club music and comes from my deep love for Miami bass and lush, soul inspired chords."

3. Make Up Bag, Part 2

"'Make Up Bag, Part 2' is a continuation of Part 1, which appeared on my EP 'Angel Crisis' earlier this year. The beginning references the first song and the feeling of being in a situation where, no matter what I did, I was never enough.

The song has two choruses and no verses. The first part of the first chorus:

“You think that you know it all

I know what you’re waiting for

Wordless like a child’s command

I know I will love again”

actually came to me in a dream. I dreamt the melody and lyrics, woke up and immediately recorded them as a voice note on my phone. What feels eerie to me is that the words describe dynamics I only consciously understood months later, as though some part of me already knew. At the same time, “I know I will love again” became a way of finding solace and strength in myself and understanding that it was okay to let go. Moments like that are part of why music feels deeply spiritual to me.

The second half plays with The Dream’s “Make Up Bag,” one of my favorite songs of all time, but one whose premise is also quite misogynistic. In the original, he suggests that after doing your girl dirty, some money spent on her makeup bag can make everything okay:

“If you ever make your girlfriend mad

Don't let your good girl go bad

Drop 5 stacks on the make up bag”

So I flipped that idea:

“You let your good girl go bad

5 stacks on the makeup bag

Won’t make your good girl come back”

Because that’s just not gonna work on me!

The second chorus draws on the story of Icarus, whose belief that he could keep flying higher ultimately caused his fall. For me, that image became a way of writing about entitlement, betrayal and the consequences of believing that your actions will never catch up with you. It reflects a relationship in which I witnessed someone cause enormous damage without really acknowledging it as wrongdoing, until eventually there was nothing left to save.

Production-wise, I was heavily inspired by grime, R&G, Timbaland and Tricky Steward obviously."

4. ULTRAFREAK

"Written for the freaks in the world. Most of the vocal is actually recorded on an iphone because it spilled out of me in the span of 15 minutes, and I couldn’t capture the same delivery again when I tried to re-record it with a better mic. For a long time, I was told that if I embraced my femininity or presented myself as a woman, I wouldn't be taken seriously as an artist. Looking back, I think that message was really about limiting my power. ULTRAFREAK is, in a way, my big 'fuck you' to the idea that I have to make myself smaller to be taken seriously. As one of my friends recently put it: 'Just let women be hot.’” In celebration of some of my idols like Trina, Gangsta Boo, Kelis, La Chat, Princess and Diamond from Crime Mob, La Zowi, Rye Rye..."

5. Tony Montana

"I wrote 'Tony Montana' on the last day of a very difficult relationship, right before leaving Montreal to move back to Europe to create the distance I needed to feel safe. Even though being cheated on was by far not the worst thing I experienced, it made it so clear to me that I was completely invisible to him. Even giving everything I could wouldn’t stop him from going somewhere I wouldn’t follow, being unfaithful and ultimately abandoning me. I was never enough. I knew that if I stayed, I would suffocate under that weight. I was trying to love someone whose insatiable, destructive desire for more ultimately cost him everything. When I finally told him I’d leave, he said to me, “I feel like Tony Montana. I wanted it all.” Tony Montana is the main character in the movie ‘Scarface’, who ends up getting killed because he kept on wanting more than he could handle.

Fun fact: in the live version of the song, I changed the lyrics from “this love will never die” to “this love had to die” because it fits more into my world today than when I originally wrote the song."

6. Hysteric Angel

"The original demo was inspired by a song I heard on a night out in Montreal. Afterwards, I decided to make my own version of what I remembered that song sounding like. I completely forgot about the demo until spring 2025, when the album needed more club energy, and that’s how “Hysteric Angel” came together. It’s an angelic, energetic club song with Jersey energy and a catchy hook, but there’s also a melancholic undertone to it, especially in the lyrics, which I think is pretty typical of my music. The piano in the outro definitely made its way in because I was living with Marina Herlop at the time. She would play piano for two and a half hours every morning, so I started gravitating towards that sound. The fact that I drew the melody note by note as MIDI instead of actually playing it gave Marina so much anxiety that she started giving me piano lessons."

7. Summer Baddies

"I’m sure you know the feeling of having a crush or a favorite artist who, in your head, is the greatest person ever to walk the earth. Then you finally meet them, and they’re a total disappointment. Sometimes it’s nicer to stay in the fantasy or indulge in it to get through a difficult moment.

Summer Baddies was written during a time when I had such severe back pain that I couldn’t walk for seven months. It was kind of my way of breaking free of the limitations of being chained to my bed and going on an imaginary drive in a drop-top with my best friends, and just to feel free and happy in that moment. More broadly, I think our experience of life is shaped more by perception than reality itself. For the production and writing I was really inspired by the Neptunes in their peak 2000s era.

I’m sure you know the feeling of having a crush or a favorite artist who, in your head, is the greatest person ever to walk the earth. Then you finally meet them, and they’re a total disappointment. Sometimes it’s nicer to stay in the fantasy or indulge in it to get through a difficult moment.

Summer Baddies was written during a time when I had such severe back pain that I couldn’t walk for seven months. It was kind of my way of breaking free of the limitations of being chained to my bed and going on an imaginary drive in a drop-top with my best friends, and just to feel free and happy in that moment. More broadly, I think our experience of life is shaped more by perception than reality itself. For the production and writing I was really inspired by the Neptunes in their peak 2000s era."

8. Full Moon

"I wrote most of “Full Moon” last May during a full moon in Barcelona, when I realized that what I’d been through wasn’t just a series of bad experiences, but something that had fundamentally changed the way I perceived myself, the people around me, and my own reality. I had developed a habit of constantly defending my perception of things, even when nobody was questioning it. Realizing the scale of that hit me so hard that I felt like I left my body, and all I wanted to do was turn that feeling into melody and lyrics.

I wrote the second verse a few months later, when I had emotionally let go. The images of dust and decay describe what was left of something that once was my entire world. The instrumental passage between the verses is heavily influenced by Grime and almost feels like a bridge in time between those two moments. The piano features heavily, probably because I wrote the song while staying at Marina Herlop’s home, with R&B and Ryuichi Sakamoto influences also finding their way into the production. I was listening to Sakamoto a lot during that time."

9. Diamond Body

"I’ve lived with chronic pain since I was 10 years old, which I think is deeply connected to growing up with an emotionally abusive father and a very complicated childhood. I wrote 'Diamond Body' a few years ago as a letter to myself, during a period when I was in extreme physical pain and going to therapy for it. I had to learn to stop running away from my feelings and instead allow myself to actually experience them, because I’m someone who feels emotions very physically, and if I don’t see them through, the physical pain lingers. It’s something I still struggle with today. The instrumental is quite obviously heavily influenced by Timbaland, as well as “The Boss” by Rick Ross."

10. Russian Roulette

“'Russian Roulette' was originally made for a singer, but she didn’t end up choosing it, so I wrote my own vocals for it. I was really obsessed with putting amps on everything at the time, especially drums, and compressing the hell out of them, which is how the obnoxious breakdown in the second half of the song happened. The song plays with the idea of emotional Russian roulette and is also a bit of a warning: if you keep playing, eventually the bullet will hit.

11. Little Bird

"Sometimes you have to accept a moment for what it is, even when you wish it could be different, and 'Little Bird' is me trying to do that. It sounds like a really sad song, but to me it actually isn’t. It showed me that something can be really beautiful and meaningful even if it exists in uncertainty. It’s one of my favorite songs to perform and makes me feel wrapped up in the warmth of my memories. I wrote it during a phase when I was listening to 'When Tomorrow Comes' by Cindy on repeat."

12. Crunk In Love

"'Crunk In Love' started out as an instrumental for Lil B after he asked me to collaborate, but he never jumped on it, although I would have loved to hear him on the track to be honest. Crunk is one of my favorite genres of music of all time and influences my production a lot, with Lil Jon being one of my favorite crunk performers and producers. In “Crunk In Love,” I reference the iconic line from “Get Low” where the Ying Yang Twins say, “369, damn you fine”. The song is actually a big ass love letter to myself. It’s about choosing myself over situations that confuse me or don’t give me what I deserve. As the saying in Spain goes, “mejor sola que mal acompañada”: better off alone than in bad company.

The production is obviously heavily Three 6 Mafia-coded, with huge funk textures and lush 808s. RIP Gangsta Boo!"

'50 Bullets To The Heart' is out now via Bellyfat.

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