Zora Jones turns heartbreak into Miami bass on 50 Bullets To The Heart

Zora Jones makes club records out of the things that hurt. 50 Bullets To The Heart, out now, is twelve tracks cut from heartbreak, grief, lust, chronic pain and the long repair that follows. She keeps the volume up, and that is the argument.

Jones grew up on a farm near Klagenfurt in southern Austria, studied fashion design in Barcelona, and has spent more than a decade building a world. Fractal Fantasy, the audiovisual platform and label she co-founded with Sinjin Hawke in 2014, paired club production with computer-rendered images and a visual language of its own; it is currently on hiatus. Her debut EP, 100 Ladies, arrived in 2015, seven tracks pulled from a stockpile she made before allowing herself to release anything. A collaboration with Hawke, Vicious Circles, came out on Planet Mu, then her debut album Ten Billion Angels, maximalist and fantastical. In 2025 she started her own imprint, Bellyfat, and put out the EP Angel Crisis this year. 50 Bullets To The Heart is where all of it turns inward.

Much of it was made between cities and in bad weather, physical and otherwise. Summer Baddies was written during seven months when severe back pain kept her from walking. Full Moon was written in Barcelona. Tony Montana was written on the last day of a difficult relationship, right before she left Montreal to move back to Europe. Hysteric Angel began as a demo she forgot about until spring 2025, when the album needed more club energy. Its piano outro exists because she was living with Marina Herlop, who played every morning. The whole thing was road-tested before release at MUTEK Montreal, in an AV show Jones designed herself: looped vocals, live keys, lighting rigged to glow from below.

The palette is Miami bass, grime, crunk, Timbaland-era R&B and a melancholy that never quite clears out. The chords are lush and soul-shaped, the low end and the drums do the arguing, and the writing keeps its pop instincts close, so even the saddest moments keep a pulse.

The title track is the thesis and the best thing here. Its main chords come from an old loop someone once told her was not very good, which makes its promotion to centrepiece a joke she is in on. She lets herself be angry on it, an emotion she has said was out of reach for years, and the final line turns the image around: "but I shoot 50 bullets right back at you." Hurt opens the record in fifty-six seconds and states the idea the other eleven tracks work out: you learn more about love during a breakup than during the relationship, and love alone is not enough. Make Up Bag, Part 2 follows with two choruses and no verses, the first of them arriving in a dream and surviving as the voice note she recorded on waking.

ULTRAFREAK is the one built for the room, most of its vocal recorded on an iPhone in fifteen minutes because the delivery would not come back on a better microphone. It refuses the trade she was offered, femininity for credibility. Tony Montana is the wound underneath: written the day the relationship ended, about being cheated on and made to feel invisible, its title borrowed from a man who lost everything because he kept wanting more. Live, she has changed "this love will never die" to "this love had to die." Hysteric Angel brings Jersey energy and a hook, its melody drawn note by note. Summer Baddies takes seven months of back pain and turns it into an imaginary drive with friends in a drop-top. Full Moon, written in Barcelona, is where she stops describing someone else and describes what the damage did to her own perception.

Take this if you have ever gone out specifically to get over something. It sits beside peak-era Timbaland and the Neptunes, beside Miami bass and the harder end of Jersey club, and it earns those neighbours without leaning on them. Anyone who followed Jones from 100 Ladies through Ten Billion Angels will hear the fantasy turn human. If you want your heartbreak plain and acoustic, there is too much machinery around the feeling here.

Two things hold it back. The iPhone vocal on ULTRAFREAK is thinner than everything around it, the price of keeping a take she has said she could not reproduce in a studio, and the chorus has to carry the difference. The record also keeps one register: even Summer Baddies and Full Moon, which are about a fantasy and about perception rather than a partner, arrive through the same wound, so the closing run can feel like one long note.

That is a 4. Jones took the worst winter of her life and made something you would actually put on at a party, anger left in rather than smoothed out, and a vow not to make herself small again. Twelve tracks of being shot at, and it ends with her shooting back.

The tracklist

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