Since first emerging in 2018, Aaliyah ‘Baby’ Zionov has been a growing and active presence in Aotearoa’s underground electronica scene. The Tāmaki Makaurau DJ and ‘happy-hardcore’ electronic producer’s second album, ‘Raceways Of My Heart,’ is an effervescently melodic and visual offering, further showcasing that Baby Zionov (she/her) brings something quite new to the table. Nur Peach talked with her about laying tracks for the raceway.

Born in Israel on Palestinian soil, Aaliyah Zionov’s parents moved the family to NZ when Zionov was five.

“It’s kind of a shit hole country,” Zionov frankly explains of that move. “When you turn 18 in Israel – if you’re an Israeli citizen – you get drafted and you do mandatory military service for three or four years. And if you’re an able bodied man, you’re in the reserve army, you’ll get called back there a couple months a year sometimes.

“My dad was getting really sick of doing that. I think my parents were just like, ‘We actually don’t want our child to be raised in this kind of environment. We don’t want them to have to do military service when they grow up.’”

As a teenager, DJing was Zionov’s first foray into music making.
“I don’t really have musical training or a musical background, but I’ve always been a huge nerd about music. DJing was the most natural way I could express that love for music.

“I didn’t really have access to DJ decks for a really long time. So I would try to make up for that by putting weeks of work into every DJ set! I would make mashups and blends that would be physically impossible to do live, unless you had like, six turntables. And I think without realising it, I was kind of learning how to produce. It’s not a huge step from working with full songs to working with loops and breaks and samples.”

Zionov performed as a DJ while studying towards a BA (majoring in Sociology and English) at the University of Auckland. The highlight of this period was a support slot for Charli XCX early in her rise to pop stardom. In the country as an opening act on Taylor Swift’s legendary Reputation Stadium Tour, she did her own headline show at the Tuning Fork.

“I actually bought a ticket. And then my friend Nikolai, who was organising it, saw my name on the ticket list, and called me like, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t even think to ask you until I saw your name. Do you want to play that show?’

“I was in the uni library when I got that call. I hung up and jumped around, ran a lap around the library, called all my friends… It was so much fun! Also really, really packed, really feral crowd, very passionate. I played after Charli, so the energy in the room was already really hectic. I matched up 212 by Azealia Banks with The Number One Song in Heaven by Sparks. And I remember seeing Charli XCX run from the back of the crowd to the front to dance because 212 was on!”

During the Covid lockdowns, Zionov became more involved with music production.

“I’d started messing around with production before that, but during lockdown I had all this free time. I was like, ‘I’m going to make an album, or I’m going to make a mixtape or whatever.’ And I just locked into that. It wasn’t an intentional break away from DJing, but I started to get booked more as a musician than as a DJ.”

Zionov adds that being an original artist in the electronic music scene is hard, because the live scene is so DJ-centric.

“The DJ set is the live experience, that’s the culture of dance music. There are fewer opportunities as an electronic musician who’s not a DJ. It’s happened a few times where I get booked for a set, and I’ll show up and there’s just DJ decks – and nothing else.

“I was like, ‘I’m not a DJ. I don’t have a DJ set prepped. I need a microphone and my laptop and my gear!’ And then I’d have to run around. I joked about changing my name to I Am Not A DJ Zionov at one point, because it kept happening! I love to DJ. I’m open to DJing, but you got to tell me!” she laughs.

2020 saw the release of Baby Zionov’s first body of work, ‘…And You Are the Bitch’, an eight-track recording on the Tāmaki Makaurau independent record label Sunreturn. Zionov calls it a mixtape. ‘Henrietta,’ which she consider as her debut album, followed in 2022. The album, and Zionov as an artist, earned nominations for the 2022 Student Radio Network Awards. She says the SRN have been incredibly supportive.

“I don’t know why they’ve gotten onto my stuff so much, but I’m very happy about it. The people who work in student radio tend to be very open minded listeners. They listen very widely, and they’re really open to new stuff from small musicians. They’re a really important part of NZ’s music ecosystem, where there’s less of a super established, very complex industry network, the way that there is in places like Australia.” 

Student radio has continued that support with 2025’s ‘Raceways Of My Heart’, the new album much more thematically and melodically oriented than ‘Henrietta’, which album Zionov decribes as essentially just 10 songs that she had been working on that year.

“I wouldn’t go into it with a clear idea, I would mess around and smush stuff together until something cool came out. I call that the ‘mad scientist in a lab’ method of producing music. This time I wanted to challenge myself to be more intentional with the way I make music. And I wanted to make the kind of music I wanted to hear. I like stuff that’s very melodic. I love complex, interesting, but functional harmonies.

“I never studied music, so I thought that kind of really composed stuff would be beyond my reach. This album was me going, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to write melodies that I think are really beautiful. I’m going to write stuff that I think will really stick in the ear and stir the heart.’” 

The album’s grand concept is the soundtrack for a racing game that doesn’t exist. It was the opening track and third single, Dolphin Diamond Raceway, feat. deepState, that sparked this concept.

“That was the first song I made for the album. I sent it to my friends, and they were like, ‘This is a racing game music!’ So I went into every track thinking, ‘What kind of environment do I want this to be soundtracking?” So the first track is a water park. The second track is the sky. Track four is a haunted laboratory. Track five is a dilapidated factory…”

Zionov cites the April 2025-released 167bpm lead single, Cirrus Homebound, as a liberating moment.
“It has this big pumping, really cheesy kind of over the top, inspirational guitar solo, a real Sonic the Hedgehog kind of moment! If I did that two or three years ago I’d have been like, ‘This is too corny. Everyone’s going to think I’m so lame.’ But I just was like, ‘I think it’s beautiful. I’m going to follow my bliss.  

“It’s a very heartfelt album. I tried to not shy away from being sincere, even if it comes out a little cheesy, or a little bit schmaltzy. It’s not the kind of stuff that you’d normally hear at the club, and I was comfortable with that.”