Zolita

Zolita cultivated a dedicated audience without lavish production values or excessive polish, relying instead on the once-fading format of the narrative music video to create self-contained mini-films evocative of MTV’s classic era. The accompanying tracks consist of infectious pop numbers centered on love, desire, and emotional turmoil, all refracted through the lens of her personal queer perspective.

Born Zoë Hoetzel in New York and raised in Calabasas, California, she is the oldest of three siblings whose German father and Danish mother gave each child the middle name “Montana” following a formative family trip to that state; among them are a college basketball player and a professional dancer. Her parents supported her creative interests from an early age, when she took up flat-pick guitar and later pursued film studies at New York University. There she began channeling those instincts toward pop songwriting while applying her training to direct, produce, and edit her own videos, a period that coincided with the cultural climate after “Born This Way,” when she first felt at ease acknowledging her attraction to women.

Under the name Zolita, she reached listeners in 2015 with the single and video “Explosion,” a sensuous, harmony-rich song paired with visuals that blended Sapphic imagery and Christian iconography. That release opened her debut EP, Immaculate Conception, which also contained the notable track “Holy.” Two years later, following the election of Donald Trump in the U.S., she put out the protest song “Woman’s World,” which became the centerpiece of her second EP, Sappho, issued in 2018.

Still an independent artist at the time, she nevertheless attracted coverage from music outlets along with millions of streams and views. Her first full-length project, Evil Angel, arrived amid the COVID-19 pandemic yet established a solid audience; when reissued the following year with the new single “Somebody I F*cked Once”—the initial installment in a video trilogy that also encompassed the non-album songs “Single in September” and “I F*cking Love You”—her reach expanded further. In 2023 she signed with the independent label AWAL and released the EP Falling Out/Falling In, spotlighting fan favorites “Ruin My Life” and “20 Questions,” followed by the 2024 album Queen of Hearts, which included the tracks “All Girls Go to Heaven” and “Small Town Scanda.”