ZORA
Zora Grey, aka ZORA, has carved a distinctive path from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, channeling her personal struggles and resilience as a Black trans woman into powerful music. After dropping out of Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 2020, Zora moved to Minneapolis, where she found community in the ballroom scene and regularly walked with both the House of Escada and the House of Old Navy.
Her 2022 debut album Z1 introduced her unique voice, but it’s her latest project, BELLAdonna, that solidifies her position as a groundbreaking artist. The horror-inspired album follows BELLAdonna, a scorned, supernatural alter ego, as she seeks revenge for all harmed women. A deeply personal work, BELLAdonna serves as both an exorcism of Zora's traumas and a powerful narrative of empowerment and transformation
Just days before the release of BELLAdona, we spoke with the singer, rapper, producer, and multi-instrumentalist about her journey, the inspiration behind her music, and the power of using art to confront both personal and collective struggles.
You grew up in LA, moved to the east-coast to attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and eventually dropped out in 2020 before relocating to Minneapolis, Minnesota. While it's surprising that you ended up in Minnesota, it's not surprising that you found a home in the ballroom community. Could you share more about your experience at Berklee and how you found your community?
The people that I met at Berklee were like, so, so sweet and so genuine. All of my besties went to Berklee, and I have nothing bad to say about the musicians and the artists–I love them down. The institution, which is always what it is, is what I have a problem with.
The reason why I was kind of kicked out, essentially from Berklee, is because I was talking about my experience of being sexually assaulted on their campus. They ended up pulling my show, a show that was gonna go to Lollapalooza in 2021. They were like, ‘Oh, Zora is dangerous. She's a little too, you know.’ But they didn't tell me.
I decided to go on Instagram Live and was like, ‘Yeah, I'm dropping out of the show, they suck.’ That moment made me realize, ‘Oh, I can just say stuff now, I don't have to shy away from things.’
That led me to joining other communities as well, such as the ballroom community, where I really found kind of a love and self-confidence in myself. You can definitely hear it in BELLAdonna as well. All of this is very much dedicated to queer and trans people. I'm speaking about it from a Femme Queen perspective, and I feel like that perspective is something that ballroom ingrained in me and taught me, especially as I was in the early stages of transitioning.
When your first album, Z1, came out in 2022, you went from zero to 100. You’ve mentioned how you were covered by Rolling Stone seven times that year. Within our community, sometimes we conflate or confuse hypervisibility with progress, and for marginalized people, specifically trans people, hypervisibility often comes with surveillance from the state and cultural and societal prosecution and policing.
The album promotional cycle has kicked off. You obviously want this album to do well, you want it to be big, and you want to be that girl. But you’re also a person, you’re not a product. How are you reconciling with all that is coming with this? We’re kiki’ing, but this is a job for both of us.
Thank you so much for asking that; I’ve never been asked that before. I've always known that I wanted to be a musician, and I've always talked about wanting to be, a pop star. But as I've gotten older, I’ve kind of realized what that actually means in terms of your mental health, and as somebody that does struggle with depression and OCD and some of these things that I would prefer to keep in hiding.
Being in the public light and making songs that are about what I'm going through will just automatically pull that into the limelight. And for Z1, I think that was something that was a little shocking for me. I was 22/23, just signed, in Rolling Stone, talking about my depression and how I was diagnosed in 2021. That is not a normal thing to do.
What I've [done] with BELLAdonna is to make the stories that are going to be publicized the ones that matter, in my opinion. BELLAdonna is a personal album. But also, I know that with trans women, we're so highly policed, and even currently, I'm an indie artist, but at my current level, there are ops: executives, chasers, people who are genuinely not good, preying on things to happen to me.
Z1 was about my mental health and about me. BELLAdonna is about us. Let me write about queer people. Let me write about the trans experience. Let me write about the DL men. Let me write about finding your femininity, finding queerness in your transness—like all of these things—because I know that people are gonna pay attention anyways. So it's like, ‘Well, since you're here, look at this.’
William Hawk
You've been working on BELLAdonna since before Z1. It's been a seven-year journey, culminating in you using the character BELLAdonna, to bear and reveal your personal horrors. You’ve cited Tyler, The Creator’s Igor and Beyoncé’s I Am... Sasha Fierce albums as inspirations, both of which are monumental in world-building with characters at the center. Can you talk about crafting this character to tell these stories?
It started as an alter ego. It was very much like, ‘Oh, I just got signed, I’m just really angsty.' And it felt like I was going through an adult puberty, in a way of just like, 'The bitch is back.' But as I started writing and talking to my ballroom mother... [the] things I was actually hearing from the people in my community... like, I was in my head thinking about people who didn’t even really care about me for real... and it’s just like, 'Oh, this is who I need to be writing about.’
BELLAdonna [has] turned into an entity—a vessel used to talk about pressing things for me. I’ve actually thought about BELLAdonna as a character, and I think I would like to bring her back for another album. I don’t know if it would be the next one, but I think she would come back to talk more about other societal issues.
On “Video Girl,” you sample the part of the late ballroom legend Octavia St. Laurent’s 1993 documentary Queen of the Underground, where she’s letting the world—and Eddie Murphy—know: Don’t fuck with me.
Shoutout out to you for bringing that to the forefront again, because I think people forget, or aren’t aware of, Eddie Murphy’s past bullshit. But also, trans women have been here forever, and they’ve been saying, 'Don’t fuck with us' for years. I love that you kind of brought some of the past into the present with this clip. Why was that important to include as part of the song?
I have a personal tie to Octavia, through our [ballroom] houses. Everybody looks up to Octavia in the ballroom community, in the trans community, and just the queer community in general. I wanted to include Octavia on this album because she just speaks to me as somebody who was visible to the public eye, was a model, and did films and unfortunately had to stealth at that time, and take the silent blame on things that were happening. As I was writing the album, I was dealing with a lot of men at the time who were DL and did not want anything to do with me, but I was just looking for the validation.
I was like, ‘What if the beginning of the album was just me watching a TV show as I’m singing the song?’ So I ended up using that sample from The Queen of the Underground. It was able to express the words that I wasn’t able to say through 'Video Girl' and also transcend my art. This is Octavia St. Laurent, who is saying the same thing that I’m saying in my little fucked-up way. Like, I’m saying it in a demonic, like, 'DON’T FUCK WITH ME,' [and] Octavia St. Laurent’s just, like, 'Don’t fuck with me.'
Your way isn’t fucked up. It’s just a different way of saying it, and I think both hold weight and are important.
The production on the album is incredible. “Sick Sex” feels like a sibling or cousin to “All Around The World” from Z1. But in totality, everything is new and evolved. You’re credited as the sole producer on all 16 tracks, except for one, “Tinytown,” and you’re credited as the sole writer on all the tracks without a feature or sample. You also engineered the project with Kurt Cavalheiro. This is a massive undertaking but your care shows in abundance.
[BELLAdonna] felt like a lot of steps forward because there were certain songs I had been working on for so long, and I was like, 'Okay, now I can reinvigorate that with new synths, with new things that I’ve learned from my 20s and things like that.' Also, I gotta shout out Kurt Cavalheiro. He does my vocal mixing for Z1, [BELLAdonna], all of the future. Thank you, Kurt.
I wanted to make sure BELLAdonna was a seamless playthrough album. That was tough as fuck. I kept asking my engineer friends, 'How do you do this?' Because I know how to make a beat, but when it comes to automating the ends of it to make it all cut off at one point? I was like, 'How do you do that?' All my engineer friends were like, 'I don’t know either, we just kind of fuck around and do it.” I ended up finding my own groove and it ended up working really great.
Making an album isn’t easy but, being a person also isn’t easy. You lost your job in 2023.
It was kind of perfect timing. I had a case management job and was doing well, and then I ended up losing it in August 2023. Literally, in that same week, my laptop that I make my music on—just crashed. Died forever. To this day, it hasn't come back. So, I was on pause, essentially, from music, and I was like, 'I don’t know what to do.' I was halfway done with BELLAdonna at this point. All the beats were created; I just hadn’t written lyrics to them.
So, I took it to the Apple Store. They said it was broken, but they got the hard drive. I basically stayed home for months on end, just crying. It was really depressing, if I’m being honest. But thankfully, I am also a pianist and guitarist. What I was able to do was finish the rest of the songs on piano and guitar. I just played to them and talked through it in therapy, saying, 'I can't wait until I get my laptop. I can't wait until I get my laptop.' Finally, in January 2024, I was able to get a new laptop, and that was when I produced “Hush“ and released it within a month. I was like, 'Please, I just need to make something.
“Hush” is Black ingenuity at its finest. You wanted to sample an '80s song, but clearing samples is very expensive, so you created your own '80s-inspired track and sampled it. Can you talk about that decision? Other artists might have abandoned the idea, but you said, 'Fuck it,' and it paid off. What was that process like?
As soon as I got my laptop back, I was just like, 'Fuck.' I was on fire. I needed to write songs. “Hush” was the first song I wrote on piano that I wanted to sound like Prince—just really '80s, airy, you know? Like, just some dude with Jerry Curl Juice, yelling his heart out, going for it.
I made half of a song and then finished it later, but I started it on guitar and piano and just recorded the “you're roll out on me” part on loop. Then, I made this little falsetto part at the end, where it’s like, “You feel me deep inside, baby?” Just like how DeBarge and classics my mom played for me when I was a kid always had that riff at the end with a big instrumental.
And I was like, 'I want to act like I’m sampling that part of a song and then just make it a trap beat.' I did that, looped it, and made it a little faster in the track—like 117 or 120 [BPM], something like that. Then I was like, 'Keep it on the hush,' and started doing that as the main lyric. After that, I was like, 'Okay, now I want to add the rap over it entirely.' That’s when I was like, 'Okay, we have magic,' because I really look up to songs like “Never Lose Me” by Flo Milli and “Agora Hills” by Doja Cat—songs that just make me melt.
At different points on this album, you take on different POVs—your 9-year-old self working through being sexually abused by your father on “Luv Letters 2 My Stink” or your assaulter on “Angel/Ghost. “ It's an incredible storytelling device. Why did it feel like the right approach to addressing these traumatic experiences?
Having OCD, it’s hard not to take the blame for things; that was something that was driving this album. When you look at it from a single-layer perspective, it’s a woman who thinks everything is her fault, and she’s a monster because of it. That’s kind of how I felt. I was able to really talk about certain things that happened to me and relate them to some of my sisters' stories, just giving them a little bit of hope. Like, 'Hey, I’ve also been through something similar, so it’s okay to not be okay.' You know what I mean? We can just talk about it and be cool.
I prefer to talk about it from both perspectives because that was something that was really tough for me growing up: dealing with that feeling of, 'Am I lying about it? Is this something I’m just making up in my head? Was I just wearing something too skimpy? Is it my fault?' You know what I mean? Even with what happened in 2022, the biggest question I’ve always had is, 'Is it my fault? Was I actually the one who was wrong?'
I wanted to make sure that BELLAdonna really harped on that element. Like, 'This is a monster story,' but it’s actually telling a sweet, soft, and scared story of a woman who’s just trying to process all these things that have happened.
The guitar solo on “The Ballad of Belladonna,” that’s you, correct?
Yep.
No question there. Just wanted to confirm that on record and say you’re fucking sick for that.
BELLAdonna feels like a big celebration of trans femmes. It's easy to do that media thing and focus on fear, asking how you feel about Trump being inaugurated in a couple days, but honestly, I don’t care to go down that road. I want to focus on joy and the pursuit of joy. Joy is contagious, inspirational, and aspirational. So outside of this new project, what’s making you happy these days? What’s making you smile and truly feel joyous?
My sisterhood—I'd say my community around me, my beautiful fiancé—just love. Love has been making me smile. What’s really made my day has been seeing all the people who’ve come together, even from my old hometown in Pasadena. People are coming together now, talking to each other, trying to figure out resources and mutual aid. I feel like there’s a resurgence of love within the actual ground—the people who are really in the community and affected by these things. So I think, for me, community has meant a lot to me these days. Just seeing it happen in real-time.
As an artist, what’s the best way to support you? Everyone pushes people toward streaming like Spotify and Apple Music, but they pay poorly. In my opinion, Bandcamp is better for artists because when you buy an album or song or merch, most of the money goes directly to the artist, y’all receive the money quicker; versus us paying a $10 monthly fee for unlimited access to every song ever created and y’all receive between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream.
Stream the music—I’d love that. Come to my shows if you’re local in Minneapolis, that’s another way. I’m always performing, always doing stuff, so if you want to be able to do that, buy my stuff on Bandcamp as well. We love Bandcamp. Also, if you want to buy my merchandise, we’re going to be selling out of it soon, so I’d say if you want to, just DM me, and I’ll get it shipped to you.
Is there anything you want to say that you didn’t get the chance to express? This is your space—anything you want to clarify, repeat, shout out, or rant about. This is completely your space to do so.
Check out, if you haven't already, the Palestinian Children Relief Fund. They're an incredibly important and needed organization right now, donating a lot of aid to Palestinian families. Also, check out the Altadena GoFundMes for some of the Black families affected by historically Black neighborhood fires, as well as the Pasadena GoFundMes. I’ve been posting them on my Instagram, so if you ever want to take a look, I'm always posting about stuff.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.