ŽIVA — ŽIIVA

Self-Released | March 2026

There are albums you listen to. Then some albums happen to you.

ŽIIVA is the second full-length from ŽIVA — the project of Melbourne-based, Croatia-born Lucija Ivšić — and I'll state plainly what needs stating: this is one of the most assured, devastating, and brilliantly constructed records to come out of this country in years. Maybe longer. This isn't hype. This is just what happens when genuine artistic vision collides with the kind of technical mastery most people spend a lifetime chasing and never catch.

Let's set the context. If you've seen ŽIVA live — and if you haven't, you're already behind — you'll know that every sound you're hearing on ŽIIVA comes from one person. One.

Lucija builds these sonic worlds in real time through live looping, vocal processing, and multi-instrumentation, and the result is simultaneously intimate and overwhelming in a way that shouldn't be possible at that scale. I watched her close out Essence Festival 2025 on the Abyss Stage, and I genuinely didn't know where to put what I'd witnessed. It was the kind of set that rearranges something inside you. ŽIIVA, the album carries that same charge, that same sense of controlled detonation.

She Is My God opens things, and it does not ease you in gently. The hypnotic pulse of it, the darkwave pressure building underneath those bilingual vocals — Omađijaj me sad, omađijaj me — bewitch me now, bewitch me — it's incantatory in the most literal sense. There's a clear kinship with Die Antwoord's most ferocious work here, that same collision of grime and gloss, aggression and seduction. But where Die Antwoord leaned into provocation as spectacle, Lucija channels it as something more like ritual. You don't just listen to this track. You submit to it.

Hopeless Pleasures is an anthem most uncomfortably — the kind of song with all the structural hallmarks of a pop banger but built on something darker and heavier underneath. The bass sits right at the centre of your chest. The lyrics — this strategy inside makes me sick, destroys my mind — hit that nerve between self-awareness and self-destruction with surgical precision. The OCD themes that run through the whole album find their clearest early statement here, the obsessive loop of wanting and failing and wanting again, dressed up in something you could almost dance to if you weren't too busy unravelling.

Idle Heart is where the emotional temperature really starts to climb. That sense of endless reaching, of giving everything and still watching the target recede — dajem sve od sebe, a ne približavam se — is expressed both in the lyric and somehow in the texture of the music itself. There's an innocence to the melody that makes the underlying anxiety land harder. The Croatian vocal passages throughout this record are worth dwelling on specifically: Lucija's use of her mother tongue isn't decorative. It's structural. It's about reclamation. There's a whole layer of meaning operating in that bilingualism about identity and displacement that rewards any listener willing to sit with it.

I See Right Through You and Undertow crank the club vibes without sacrificing any of the psychological weight. These are tracks that function brilliantly on a dancefloor at 1am but also have this quality of being somehow untrustworthy, and I mean that as the highest compliment. There's always a sense of danger with a ŽIVA track — a question of which personality you're dealing with, which emotional register is the real one. It's not vague postmodern instability; it's a deliberate, curious, psychologically coherent kind of derangement. Undertow in particular deserves comparison with the best of Lingua Ignota and early Chelsea Wolfe — that same grim brilliance, club energy wrapped around something genuinely harrowing.

Hesitation is dreamy and disorienting in equal measure — the beat structure has this acid techno meets trap quality that sits weirdly and wonderfully, and the vocal delivery across it is extraordinary. Guts never lie, hesitation eats away — the whole track has this feeling of standing at the edge of something, unable to jump, unable to step back. It's one of the record's most purely emotional moments.

Head Above Ground has the best intro I've heard in a long time. The arrival of it — savage electronica, a pure soundclash of elements that have no business coexisting and somehow cohere perfectly — is a genuine WTF moment, and I say that with reverence. It floors you. The sheer power of this masterpiece demands festival stages, and it will get them. Remember, this is one person doing this. One person wrote this, programmed this, produced this, and then will build it from nothing in real time in front of you. That context doesn't just add to the achievement — it reframes it entirely.

Unrest follows without mercy. The jackhammer pulse of it is brutish and beautiful simultaneously. The ghost of her punk roots in Punčke is at its most audible here — that DIY aggression, that refusal to be polished into palatability. The ghost that haunts me is my unrest. The whole record is circling this same wound from different angles, and here it's the most exposed.

(Photo: Bee Elton @ SIRC_UIT)

And then No End in Sight closes it — and this one you need headphones for, proper ones, because the layers in here reward the attention. The closing track reimagines the Croatian traditional folk song Ljeljo, and the way Lucija weaves Croatian choir into this electronic framework is both her most personal gesture on the album and its most universal one. The dark ambience, the sense of something tightening, the refusal to offer easy resolution — it's a closer that leaves you somewhere different from where you started.

The track sequencing across ŽIIVA is worth its own paragraph. This isn't a collection of songs. It's a structured psychological journey with the architecture of a thriller — pacing, tension, release, escalation — and the care in that arrangement is as much a part of the art as any individual track. The programming of the electronica throughout is atmospheric in the most precise sense of the word: it builds worlds rather than just beats.

Lucija Ivšić is one of the best artists working in this country right now. ŽIIVA is the proof you can hand to anyone who needs convincing. Buy it. Seek her out live. And if you get the chance to be in a room when she performs it, don't you dare waste that opportunity.

ŽIIVA is out now on Bandcamp.

xziva.bandcamp.com | https://www.instagram.com/_xziva/

https://xziva.org/

10/10. Unhinged, emotive perfection.

SO SUPPORT THIS ARTIST BY ATTENDING HER PERFORMANCES, BUYING PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL MEDIA AND SPREADING THE WORD!!!

Also check out this brilliant limited edition version of the CD (50 only!) with a 3D insane designed sleeve: