“I think the moment it all clicked for me was when I subconsciously started using more and more war metaphors,” Zima Kamimoto recalls. “That’s when I realized I was getting somewhere, that there was a new album coming.” Nothing about Warfare/Pretty Leverage was accidental. The project grew like a tide, pulling her forward before she even had language for what she was building. What emerged is her most vulnerable, exacting, and self-defining work to date — a record split in two halves, each revealing something she had never fully allowed herself to say before.
The Sound of Sharp Edges
“Production was really the lead factor in this album this time,” she explains. “I was so specific about the way I wanted it to sound, especially for Warfare. I wanted it to sound really dark, but in an elegant way, so to speak.” Every track on the Warfare side is deliberate. Aesthetic violence delivered with poise. Control disguised as vulnerability. Vulnerability disguised as control.
She laughs remembering the recording of Pyrrhic Victory: “You know the line ‘I used to hold you like you were my last breath’? I wanted to emulate being out of breath. But there’s a thin line between sounding deliberately breathless and just sounding like you’re dying. Finding that middle point was… a challenge.”
Letting the Armor Fall
“This is definitely my most vulnerable album,” Zima says. “I know every artist says that, but I feel it this time. This is the first album I’ve put out where I feel 100% exposed.” Her earlier work, she admits, lived behind metaphors — partly out of caution, partly out of habit.
“In my EPs I was nervous about what people at school or wherever would say about me. And The Snow Queen was heavily thematic, cyber-themed, so there wasn’t much room to be raw.” Here, though, she opens the doors. “Emotionally, Bartender is one of the hardest songs for me to sing,” she says. “One of my favorites I’ve ever written, but so brutal.” She pauses. “Dead Girl Walking too.” These were the songs she once would have hidden. Now they form the spine of the album.
Shapeshifting in real-time
Not every track stayed in its original skin. “‘Crash Your Party!’ is unrecognizable compared to the demo,” she says. “Americana-country feels truer to me now, so the song followed.” “Cosplay,” she notes, “ended up sounding very different from what I pictured at first. But I love it. It’s one of my favorites.”
Where Songs Come From
“My recording environment is very quiet, but since I have ADHD I cannot stay still. I’m always wandering around and recording songs in bits,” she confesses. For her, lyrics often appear suddenly — uninvited, insistent. “I think it’s very common for songwriters to have these bursts of ideas,” she says. “But Oh Anna was one of those songs that felt involuntary. I was just existing and kept getting hit with lines out of nowhere, so I wrote the song from all those fragments.”
One of the album’s most surprising moments happened at the eleventh hour. “Funny thing is that Oh Anna was re-recorded at the absolute last minute because I had a different name instead of Anna. And when ‘Anna’ came to my mind I knew it was the title of the song. So I had to re-record it, acting like crazy so that it would be finished on time.”
Where the Truth Lives
One of the hardest confessions on the album sits inside the Pretty Leverage side. “I think it’s risky to make an album about… liking to have control, I guess,” she says. “Because it can sound manipulative, and I just had to put it out hoping people would be smart enough to understand what I meant.”
The moment she realized she was making a double-concept album came slowly. “At the beginning of the year — right around when I released Babydoll — I hadn’t decided it would be released as a double album. Back then it was only Pretty Leverage. It only truly solidified later.”
As for her favorite song? “I think my favorite song is the title song Pretty Leverage.” When considering what truth she infused into these songs, she circles back to a theme she keeps discovering within herself: “I think the truth is that I’m finally allowing myself to say things plainly. To not disguise them, not hide them behind characters or metaphors. This record is the closest I’ve ever gotten to saying what I actually feel without softening it.”
Zima Kamimoto
Critical Review — Warfare / Pretty Leverage
Zima Kamimoto’s Warfare / Pretty Leverage reads like an artist finally refusing to hide behind metaphor, costume, or mythology. Across the lyrics she’s shared, there’s a striking shift from theatrical frostiness to a kind of precision-cut honesty that feels both deliberate and unavoidable—an album made by someone no longer able to dilute herself.
The Warfare half is the colder blade. Songs like “Fire in the Hole” collapse paranoia, fear, and emotional erosion into language that feels claustrophobic on purpose. Lines like “My safe space is now inhabitable / My paradise is now inhabitable” work because they’re not dressed up; they’re blunt. The repetition and the decaying imagery build a portrait of someone whose emotional compass has been shattered, yet who is still trying to map the ruins. Even the more theatrical moments—the warnings, the surveillance, the “Big Brother” callback—land as genuine distress rather than performance.
Where her older work once wrapped itself in cyber motifs and fantastical distance, these lyrics do the opposite. They move inward, compressing the world until the only thing left to look at is the self.
The Pretty Leverage half opens up a different register. The playfulness isn’t masking anything; it’s weaponized honesty. The title track’s tone—light, cheeky, almost glimmering—contrasts with how sharp the underlying confession is: the desire to hold power, not out of malice but out of self-preservation. Zima frames leverage as survival, not manipulation, and the tension between those two interpretations is what makes the track compelling. It’s an album about the dangerous clarity that comes when someone stops pretending innocence is sustainable.
Elsewhere, “Bartender” reads like emotional triage—raw, unvarnished, fragile in ways her previous discography never allowed. “Dead Girl Walking” is equally revealing, a piece built around exhaustion rather than spectacle. The questioning, the ache, the fixation on endings that feel perpetual—it’s some of her sharpest lyrical work because it’s unshielded. She doesn’t write toward catharsis; she writes toward truth, even when it’s ugly.
“Tristan” stands out as one of the album’s sharpest emotional blows, a song that moves like a fever dream—feverish, obsessive, and deliberately uncomfortable. The lyrics spiral between surrender and self-reproach, capturing the kind of longing that feels more like haunting than romance. Lines like “You do nothing and I feel everything” and “I’d drink poison if it tasted of you” reveal a narrator fully aware of her own unraveling yet unable, or unwilling, to sever the thread. The song’s real power lies in its awareness: the desire is unreciprocated, the spell is self-inflicted, and the singer knows it.
The Pretty Leverage half opens up a different register. The playfulness isn’t masking anything; it’s weaponized honesty. The title track’s tone—light, cheeky, almost glimmering—contrasts with how sharp the underlying confession is: the desire to hold power, not out of malice but out of self-preservation. Zima frames leverage as survival, not manipulation, and the tension between those two interpretations is what makes the track compelling. It’s an album about the dangerous clarity that comes when someone stops pretending innocence is sustainable.
Warfare/Pretty Leverage was released this past Halloween and is available on all music stores.
Connect with Zima Kamimoto on the official website: www.zimamelodyamerica.com
