Abyss draws from all of Anika’s previous work, which ranges from the crackly, dub-adjacent grooves of her eponymous debut, through the muscular post-punk she released with the group Exploded View, to the delicate, ambient-inflected soundscapes of 2023’s Eat Liquid. The result is a supple mode of Dark Wave, accessible to a broad audience, but still tough as nails.
Although Anika, whose legal name is Annika Henderson, was born in the UK and can sound like a native speaker of English, she delivers her vocals in a German accent that recalls the Sprechgesang of post-Velvet Underground Nico and the experimental musicians who made West Berlin one of post-punk’s crucial nodes during the early 1980s.
Anika’s impressive use of the music video form also hearkens back to that era, when what people heard on records was inextricably bound up with their visual presentation. By appearing in these videos, she communicates how invested she is in her songs, to the point of almost dissolving into them.
A former journalist, Anika has thought long and hard about how her work connects with the wider world. Rather than take a polemical approach, she consistently finds the sweet spot between the personal and political.
Is “Hearsay” about intimate relationships or a political landscape dominated by toxic social media? Is “Oxygen” about emotional claustrophobia or the air quality in densely populated cities?
Abyss impresses more with each listen precisely because these questions cannot be definitively answered. The songs are mirrors that reflect your mood, shifting back and forth between restrained introspection and diffuse allegory.
The longer I listened to the album, the more it made me think of a distinction that the cultural theorist Roland Barthes makes in his landmark 1970 book S/Z, between texts that do their best to reinforce the structure their authors had in mind and those that prioritise what he calls “structuration,” a kind of quantum state in which fixity gives way to fluidity.
Barthes strongly favoured the latter, promoting freedom over control.
“Reading does not consist in stopping the chain of systems, in establishing a truth, a legality of the text”, he writes. “It consists in coupling these systems, not according to their finite quantity, but according to their plurality (which is a being, not a discounting): I pass, I intersect, I articulate, I release, I do not count”.
Abyss definitely prioritises the infinite. Precisely because Anika avoids getting too specific, she facilitates the discernment of multiple meanings.
On first listen, “Walk Away” comes across as the stream of consciousness of someone trying to think their way out of an unsatisfying relationship.
Yet the song also doubles as incisive social commentary when heard within the right frame of mind. It recalls episodes of the dystopian near-future television series Black Mirror, capturing the poverty of social interaction today in the wake of pandemic-exacerbated trends that social media had already been pushing for decades.
The song begins by distilling the sentiments of someone who has realised that there is no reason to settle for interactions that fail to satisfy:
The truth is I don’t really like myself
And the truth is I don’t really like anyone else
And the truth is I’d rather be alone than with you
And the truth is I’d rather be at home than with you.
While these lines don’t read smoothly on the page, Anika fits them to the song’s driving beat with aplomb.
To my ear, that’s the most salient feature of her songwriting, which consistently finds a way to make lines impactful despite or even because of their awkward phrasing.
A great example comes later in “Walk Away”:
Sometimes I know
Life can be confusing
Sometimes I know
Life can just suck
So screw you
The offhand, conversational quality of these lyrics bypasses the fixation on style that characterises most Dark Wave. But experienced readers of poetry will recognise how much work goes into creating the impression that something hasn’t been overworked.
After devoting so much attention to isolation and resignation, the last song on Abyss comes as a surprise.
“Buttercups” conjures a land of plenty in stark contrast to the depleted world suggested by “Oxygen” and “Into the Fire”, which seems to offer an oblique critique of billionaires’ pursuit of space travel when we have “plundered the beauty of the earth”:
They’re buttercups
And I’m pulling my fingers through
I’m dreaming of all the things I’d like to do
I’m dreaming of buttercups
And pulling my hands through
Like buttercups
And I’m twisting and churning and turning
It’s not hard to hear these lines as a testament to the resilience of corporeal desire in spite of everything that threatens to stamp it out. By the end of the song, however, it becomes clear that this desire is shadowed by melancholy:
They’re yellow smiling faces
Gaze up at me
Oh, the buttercup fields
Oh, the buttercup fields
Oh, they’re so open and gay
Oh, I’m thinking of the simpler days
Oh, the simpler days
Despite this sense of looking over one’s shoulder, “Buttercups” still manages to suggest that simpler days might lie in the future as well as the past.
In an interview for her 2021 album Change, which Anika performed extensively, she noted that, although “people do bad things”, we should not reduce them to their worst selves.
“In this climate of distorted news and news bubbles, people are led into traps and false perceptions of reality”, she noted. “I think it’s important to stick together in these times and see these bad decisions and actions as transient and that most people have the capacity to change”.
Although Barthes’ distinction between structure and structuration is typically understood in spatial terms, it also has a temporal dimension. If our conception of people fixes them at a specific juncture in their lives, particularly one that inspires others to think poorly of them, we are reinforcing a toxic structure instead of making room for it to evolve into something better.
That’s why, despite Anika’s strong political convictions, she tries to limit the negative content in her songs.
“I’ve really made a pact”, she noted in a 2016 interview about Exploded View’s debut. “I don’t want to share this bad news or these images anymore because we’re so overwhelmed by it”.
This pact also extends to political disagreements within the left.
Asked why Abyss is more forceful and gritty than her two previous albums, Anika explained that she wanted to respond to “this weird time where the left fights the left and everyone has to be perfect, or else they are cancelled”.
That perfectionism also represents the triumph of structure over structuration, making it impossible for the left to mount meaningful resistance to the reactionary forces besieging it worldwide.
She laments that “the only rebellion” against this fixation on failure seems to be “coming from the right, where they flaunt their imperfections and celebrate their felonies. It’s really disgusting”, she continued. They are “planting squabbles within the left, knowing it will keep them distracted, like throwing raw meat into a lion‘s cage – and people are falling for it”.
By delivering one compelling song after another that refuses to fall into this trap, Abyss provides a valuable alternative to the sort of tired political engagement that has lost the capacity to shift gears.
The left has a steep climb ahead. But it’s only going to make progress if it follows the lead of artists like Anika, who refuse to let their politics be restricted by idées fixes.
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Screenshot from “Oxygen” video courtesy of Soup Film. All rights reserved.
