Iona Zajac – Bang: Album Review

Live4ever 19 November, 2025

Artwork for the Iona Zajac album Bang

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Having turned solo a few years ago, it’s clear that Iona Zajac’s new album has an energy to it which comes from obsessively picking through some fucked up 21st century metas.

Choose your cliché: on a hiding to nothing, accepting a poisoned chalice, falling on a double-edged sword?

Truly there are fewer jobs in the musical world which offer either the opportunity or disgrace of following the dearly beloved Shane MacGowan as the singer of The Pogues.

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And yet for Edinburgh’s Iona Zajac it was an offer gladly accepted, a display of balls which once you read on will make more sense, the story illustrating why it was less of a risk than it seemed.

She wasn’t alone by the way, joining Spider Stacey, James Fearnley, Jem Finer and a host of acclaimed new Pogues touring members including Nadine Shah, Lisa O’Neill, and Lankum’s Daragh Lynch.

As part of this ensemble, she helped bring classics back to life (especially a boot stomping rendition of Poor Paddy) for audiences on both sides of the Atlantic in the spring of 2025.

That was far from all though. Now we have Bang, Iona Zajac’s debut album but one that she says, ‘Really does feel like a lot of my past 15 years in a nutshell, it’s quite a full on’, and one of which the desired reaction for listeners should be, ‘Thanks for listening, thanks for thinking, let’s go bang crazy’.

Now perhaps you can see why she took the gig. Formerly of Glaswegian based blues duo Avocet, Iona Zajac spent her childhood performing at impromptu family gatherings and learning about traditional Scottish music, eventually choosing the Clarsach (a kind of harp) as her first instrument.

Having turned solo a few years ago, it’s clear that Bang has an energy to it which comes from obsessively picking through some fucked up 21st century metas, not least of which is the ruin of female/male dynamics, still the world’s most dangerous sport for all of the participants.

It’s probably easier though to just talk about it. Opener Bowls starts with a drum beat like the accompaniment to some kind of ceremonial march, and even when Zajac’s lamenting voice kicks in, the impression remains of a requiem for something lost being paraded for an uncaring public.

This feeling of apathy and abandonment is central to Dilute, a song from a dream the singer had which saw emancipation as an idea going deeper, the result a collective female rage gathered in a forest and painted blood red.

There is an obvious gravity here; Iona Zajac traverses the lines between P.J. Harvey and Anna B. Savage, refusing like them notions of compromise.

That’s not so say though that there aren’t isolated moments of surrealist humour, the dreamlike Chicken Supermarket transforming the fruit of hallucinatory encounters with Billy Connolly and seas of jelly into a folkish, Summerisle vibe.

Central to the album’s pitch though is escaping the confines of both past and future experiences; the contrasting headspaces are played out in visceral narrative technicolour.

At this root on the one hand lies Anton, a blast of post-traumatic scorn that coagulated on the other side of a dangerously one-sided relationship.

Here, the darker half is calculating and volatile, a brutality dismissed with, “Go fuck yourself/Go learn to get consent”, before Zajac then allows herself to dissolve into a harrowing a primal scream.

By contrast, the title-track is a reclamation of sex outside the boundaries of society’s condemnatory lens; an alt rock strut, it’s a moment of lightness designed to foster audience connection, one that works brilliantly.

For someone with the strength of character to not fear being Shane MacGowan, Bang is no less than you would expect Iona Zajac to deliver; it’s a sometimes-hard road, but one that leads to promise and emotional fulfilment.

Andy Peterson

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Tags:andy peterson, Iona Zajac