Anika Simplifies the Complex on Change

Annika Henderson’s voice hovers over her music like a maglev train: Her words seamlessly float and glide above their backdrop, despite their weight. On Change, the German-British musician’s newest album as Anika, her musings on reclaiming power and maintaining hope—even when both seem futile—carry plenty of heft. The simple language in which she renders these complex concepts lessens their load, and her singing drifts over her kraut-adjacent electronic experiments with a ghastly pulse that casts her words as varyingly poised, ironic or threatening. The way her voice and music bounce off one another is consistently energizing, even at Change’s often modest tempos.

Change is Henderson’s first solo album since her self-titled 2010 LP, a tinny BEAK> co-production on which all but two songs were covers. Her versions of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and Yoko Ono’s “Yang Yang,” on which you could practically hear the paint peeling off the studio walls, were stark reminders that these decade-old songs’ concerns will never lose relevance. Their themes tied directly into Henderson’s background as a political journalist, and she later brought her social fascinations and bone-dry sound to her kraut-psych band Exploded View. The title track of the group’s 2017 EP Summer Came Early unsubtly addresses how little we’re doing to address climate change, and the dominant theme of 2018’s Obey is how even at our most personally liberated, we’re still boxed into heeding societal standards. Unsurprisingly, in returning to her solo career, Anika still has plenty to say about both herself and the world.

On Change, Henderson delivers nine original songs, with—for the first time—no lo-fi production stifling her Nico-esque drawl and eerie synths. Like Laurie Anderson before her, she finds immense power in hypnotic arrangements that cast her as a prophet who uses the surreal to show that even everyday minutiae are products of the systems that entrap us. On the album’s title track, as the warble of her gradually unfurling voice creeps across wooing synths, she sounds fully convinced that just listening to one another can cure all kinds of social ills. As she repeats, “I think we can change,” it becomes less an opinion than a fact. She sounds just as steadfast on “Freedom,” manifesting personal liberation with chant after chant of “I’m not being silenced,” and the cascading electronics below her suggest that this mantra isn’t a wish—it’s a promise.