Mildly unhinged and problematic
There’s a type of artist who doesn’t just make music—they provoke, personify, and disrupt. Zekiizo doesn’t arrive in the room quietly, and that’s not a comment on volume. It’s her posture: confrontational, alert, and deliberately fractured. Raised in Boston and now embedded in New York’s raw artistic underbelly, she is part musician, part visual saboteur, and entirely uninterested in making you feel comfortable. What she creates is sometimes beautiful, sometimes abrasive, and always awkward in the best way. Her music leans into the dark corridors of electronic pop, but refuses to stay put. There are traces of early Laurie Anderson in the way she manipulates voice and structure—not to decorate, but to disorient. There’s a Yoko Ono-like insistence that the body is not a passive medium but a political tool, a sexual question mark, a haunted space. And like those women before her, Zekiizo is not here to entertain. She’s here to confront, seduce, and complicate.
New York has long been a testing ground for artists who weaponise discomfort. Zekiizo fits this lineage not because she mimics it, but because she revives its urgency. Her performances feel closer to confrontation than choreography. She doesn’t simply perform the music; she becomes it. Her body, her gaze, her presence—they all participate in the score. There’s no neat line between artist and artwork, no safe distance. In her world, the emotional landscape is jagged and the emotional labour is real. She isn’t offering escapism. She’s offering a mirror, cracked and unflinching.
That refusal to resolve—sonically or emotionally—is central to her current work. Her latest track, though dressed in upbeat production and slinky melodies, hides a jagged truth. It’s about the brutal unfairness of moving on. Lust and intimacy are present, but so is imbalance. The pleasure is complicated, the aftermath unclear. She doesn’t ask for sympathy or offer tidy conclusions. Instead, she presents the scene as-is: charged, chaotic, and ultimately unresolved. This is not confessional songwriting in the traditional sense—it’s closer to performance art, where the artist implicates themselves just as much as the audience.
What makes Zekiizo especially vital in today’s culture is her insistence on remaining complicated. She doesn’t simplify her emotions for the sake of relatability or mould her sound to fit the playlist economy. Her aesthetic—visually and sonically—is a tangle of contradictions, and she leans into every one. There’s dark humour running beneath the surface, a kind of self-aware theatricality that invites you to question not just what you’re feeling, but why. She’s not interested in cleaning up the mess. She wants you to see it, touch it, maybe even dance in it.
To call her “boundary-pushing” doesn’t quite capture it. Those labels still assume there’s a centre she’s trying to escape from. Zekiizo doesn’t orbit the centre—she ignores it completely. What she’s doing feels closer to a form of artistic refusal: refusal to resolve, to explain, to accommodate. And in a culture that increasingly rewards clarity and coherence, there’s something quietly radical about being mildly unhinged and proudly problematic.