Anika at Brudenell Social Cub
Johnny James, Managing Editor
Political-journalist-turned-musician Annika Henderson is about to drop her third studio album. Apparently it’s her heaviest and angriest to date, making her intimate gig at Brudenell Social Club an extra exciting prospect.
Anika broke in 2010 with a self-titled LP recorded with BEAK>, filled mainly with noir covers of ’60s pop and folk songs. Among the standouts was an eerie take on The Kinks’ 1965 classic, ‘I Go To Sleep’. Powered by Anika’s icy, Nico-tinged vocals, it became a cult hit, making the next logical step an album of originals. But that wouldn’t happen for another decade. In the intervening years the Surrey-born, Berlin-based artist co-founded electro-psych outfit Exploded View, whose extra-terrestrial second album Obey is well worth a listen if you’ve not heard it.
Anika’s second solo record, Change, came in 2021, bringing skittering, austere electronic meanderings reminiscent of Broadcast and Hi Scores-era Boards of Canada. It’s an intense and compelling record, with highlights including the krauty title track, the glistening ‘Finger Pies’ and the industrial ‘Freedom’.
Happily, we don’t have to wait so long for her third full-length record. Reportedly heavier than anything she’s released to date, Abyss sees Anika – once a political journalist who wrote on class and capitalism – vent her frustration, anger, and confusion with contemporary life:
“There’s so much going on in the world, and you have to sit there and watch it through a screen that you’ve allowed into your home, like a vampire who had been praying at your door, then immediately digest it, have an opinion, and publicly comment on it. Abyss is like a call to action. To come and figure it out together.”
The thrashing, driving, lead single and album opener ‘Hearsay’ is a prickly anthem in the spirit of PJ Harvey – gothic, grungy and raw as hell. Lyrically it hones in on the extreme divisions between the left and right in contemporary society, exacerbated by social media moguls who feed off the blood of the public: “And yesterday’s papers they line my bird cage / And you’re telling me tales to get your own way / And you’re making up stories to push your narrative / And you’re making up tales to be provocative”.
Abyss was recorded live to tape at the legendary Hansa Studios in Berlin (where the likes of Depeche Mode and David Bowie also recorded) in just a few days. Tracking live and allowing minimal overdubs was an important decision, Anika stresses, in order to capture the raw immediacy of the album. As before, she wrote the songs herself before fleshing them out with Martin Thulin (Exploded View), and then assembled a live band to join the pair in the studio.
So far it’s just that one tune we’ve heard from the record, but if the rest of the album follows suit, it’s going to be a great record, and that extra venom brings with it an excitement around the live shows.
Performing with a four-piece band, Anika plays at YES in Manchester on 30 April and at Brudenell in Leeds on 1 May.
