Abyss (Anika)
Updated: Sep 6
For fifteen years now, the face of Anika, the artistic and committed double of Anglo-German political journalist Annika Henderson, has been growing up in rough silhouette on the Berlin pavement. Following her meeting with Geoff Barrow (Portishead, Beak) and a promising debut in 2010, the evocatively-named Exploded View adventure was born, with bandmates Hugo Quezada and Martin Thulin, and a number of acclaimed releases such as Obey (2018). This new line-up enabled Anika to explore a musical mix of pop, rock and dub, with the deployment of surrealistic universes to which she brings her almost icy post-punk universe as a witness to a world in full dereliction, which brought her to the attention of Tricky (they collaborated on “Lonely Dancer”) and other personalities from the world of electro, techno and trip-hop music.
But in 2021, Anika went solo again with the somber Change: nine tracks where the songwriting becomes more incisive on a music reinvested by Anika, more melodic and rockier too, allowing her to express her perception of the world more directly. The album's concluding track, “Wait for something”, put us on the track of a kind of dissatisfaction, with Anika seemingly determined to get even closer to what she felt in the future.
It wasn't until 2025 that Anika completely shed her chrysalis and, with her new Abyss, unleashed her inner grunge rock. The album doesn't belie Anika's desire to experience the tension of the world live, viscerally, even if it means coming away flayed: razor-sharp lyrics, raw rhythms, squealing guitars, anguished video clips (like the one for “Oxygen”, the new single from the album, signed by Laura Martinova and its refrain “Give me oxygen / Give me what I want”), all the ingredients are there to deliver a perception of the world on the brink of the abyss. With this album, Anika opens up a new, more electric space for personal expression, underlined by the fact that the album was recorded in Berlin, in near-live conditions. The ten tracks that make up the album are hotly debuted, like the introductory “Hearsay” on the lie of information (“And yesterday's newspapers, they line my birdcage / And you're telling me tales to get your own way”), the brilliant “One way ticket” on the rise of extremes, (“The city didn't learn the lessons of its past / Making deals with the snakes and the sharks”), its martial drums and guitar straight out of the Hole years, Anika's voice reminiscent of the declamations of a committed Patti Smith, as on “Out of the shadows”, which projects us with its punk rhythm back to the late 70s.
Even when she becomes more intimate, as on the diamond in the rough “Honey” and its heady rhythm to the point of madness, Anika remains visceral (“I want to be free from you (...) / Drunk from your persuasion”). Looking critically into the mirror, she admits she doesn't like herself and wants to get away from herself, the woman who was still willing to watch things happen without taking action. Each time, this inhabited writing puts us somewhere on the edge between the world and ourselves, intimate derelictions exasperating universal crises ("Last song" says: “The markets are crashing, the forests are on fire / The oceans, they're boiling / The dust is rising and people are still fighting (...) The right are all winning (...) The robots are ruling / The logic is drooling / Dripping out your open mouth”).
But Anika's music hides a light at the end of the tunnel, convinced as she is that we can still change things by getting back to reality. On "Into the fire", set against a psychedelic soundscape, she throws herself into the fire and asks: "Won't you sober all those needs / That keep me from being? / Can't you see?) An injunction to abandon the useless, to return to the body, to the relationship between people, by opening our eyes and acting together. In the eponymous “Abyss”, she directly invites us to join her (“Come as you are in this wilderness / Come as you are in this wilderness abyss”), a Come As You Are that can't be a coincidence so much the grunge, desperate and tortured spirit of the 90s permeates this magnificent new album, It's already a cornerstone of Anika's career, but also of the transitional era we're living through, and will undoubtedly be best appreciated live, as Anika embarked on a European tour in January that will take her to the USA from September onwards.
In Abyss, the artist synthesizes, with a particularly rocking personal anger, half a century of injustices and divisions that have brought us to where we are today: on the brink of the abyss. Powerful as a megaphone, caustic as a Maldororian chant, inhabited as a shamanic dance at the foot of the Wall.
A must-listen, and for those who can, a must-see!
ANIKA, Abyss album on Youtube
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