The Spoils is a debut full-length studio album by Nika Roza Danilova, better known as American singer-songwriter Zola Jesus, released in July 2009 on Sacred Bones Records.

For me, the ideal is bringing both the experimental and the pop music in," Zola Jesus commented,[3] noting that percussion played an important role in the album's structure too.

[6] The Spoils (quoting The Fact magazine) "saw her master a unique vocabulary of drones, cavernous acoustics and rich, anachronistic vocal timbres buried within a dense layer of lo-fi grain that suggested that Zola Jesus had very much found her voice.

"[7] A Boomkat reviewer pointed to "doom ridden, barely decipherable lyrics and emaciated drum machines somewhere between Siouxsie Sioux and Cold Cave" as the album's sound main feature.

"The effect is a windswept and romantic scene of pop emotions wrung with blood curdling howls, bristling with synth electrics and booming with Robin Guthrie-esque drums.

[8] According to Pitchfork, as compared to earlier singles and EPs (which were "promising, with an immediately identifiable aesthetic" but "pulled in a few different directions, between structure and atmosphere, or vulnerable longing and stark, theatrical wailing") The Spoils is "a potent mix of layered and otherworldly vocals, muddy electronics, and storefront-church keyboards", full of tension, dynamics and raw emotion.