Annahstasia: The Best of What's Next

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Annahstasia Enuke joins our call while checking out at Dream Fishing Tackle, a vintage furniture-meets-record store in Greenpoint. She pays, leaves, and sits on a bench nearby. I ask her for a haul. “I grabbed an eclectic mix,” she says, digging into the paper bag. “When I get used records, I try and find world music. So I found The Pulse of Tanam: Ghana Raga from South India. I found one that’s orchestral music from China. And the last one is Drums of Passion from a town near where my dad was born in Nigeria.” It’s been three days since she released her debut album, Tether, into the world, and it’s yet to settle in. “I haven’t really had a chance to feel much of anything,” she says. “But the reception has been so warm, and there’s been so much love and appreciation for the music. I’m grateful it’s resonating the way I hoped it would.”

It’s a rare thing to sit in the quiet after a release. But if there’s one word to describe the Los Angeles musician’s career and overall artistic ethos, it’s patience. Plans for her debut were shelved by the label she’d signed to at age 17, forcing her to wait out the remaining seven years of her contract before she could release anything independently. In the interim, she dipped away into seclusion, exploring different mediums and experimenting with her voice to find her rich, warm timbres and stirring vibratos—Tether’s emotional throughline. She turned towards the likes of Nina Simone, Bill Withers, and Janis Joplin for inspiration, but she also searched inward. “In a way, I got to develop myself in complete obscurity and silence, just waiting for that to be over,” she says. “Learning my voice better and learning what I wanted to do with my voice, learning what felt good in my body, and coming out of my body.” Annahstasia takes a full-body approach to music, transferring an inner peace through her voice and into her creative process. She refers to music like one would yoga, as a “practice,” leading with intention, ever mindful of the energy she emits through song.

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In 2023, Annahstasia released her EP, Revival, by herself (“No label, no distro, no publishing, no PR”), the music rising from a long period of stillness she had just emerged from. “I was so scared and wounded by my experience in the industry,” she remembers. “[Revival] was me poking my head out and hoping that people were going to be kind.” It’s a gentle reintroduction, Annahstasia stepping back into the industry on her own terms. It’s part reflection, part celebration—an exploration of how her time in solitude instilled in her a deeper connection to self. That confidence and trust carried her into her next project, giving her a foundation on which to build something even deeper.

Annahstasia carried the songs that would become Tether for three years, letting them simmer and evolve into a familiar, stirring meditations on love, loss, and human connection. During that time, she recorded the album in full, twice—first as demos, then in a garage with a full band of friends. “It kind of descended into maximalist chaos,” she reveals. “I ended up scrapping literally all of that, everything.” Regardless, the sessions brought insight: “I learned how crucial the arrangement is to the life of these songs. That you can really step on them and suffocate the music if you don’t make the right choices.” Tether is deliberate. Every aspect of the recording process speaks to the album’s main ideas of our shared humanity. It was exclusively recorded live, leaning into the buzz of a bunch of musicians in a room together. “Everything is recorded without a metronome, just the natural rhythm of our human body,” Annahstasia says. “What I was after is that unspoken energy between all of the musicians collaborating. And for the naturalist, minimalist approach to the record, recording live was to me the only way to do that.”

She calls herself “anti-grid,” favoring a holistic, full view of music over disjointed parts. This preference shaped Tether’s balanced, all-consuming palette, giving the entire tracklist a lived-in, homey fauna of sounds. Recording live allowed for each recording to take a different shape, the songs evolving as they made it further into their sessions. “Each song is performing a role. There’s a life that is lived within each take that adds to the greater narrative of the album,” she says. “You get to use that as a medium, too: how far into the repetition you are, it becomes another palette that you’d get to paint with.” Tether is a meticulous amalgamation of takes, each specifically selected to push the greater narrative of connection.

Annahstasia’s bout of solitude opened her up to exploring other means of artistic expression: She went back to school and dove deep into visual art, dance, photography—anything she could do to express herself that wasn’t songwriting. (She has a separate, equally notable modeling career, posing for Nike, Tory Burch, Tommy Hilfiger, and Calvin Klein, among others.) She incorporates these media and outlets into her musical process, using them as a bridge connecting the songs to the physical world. “It helps to be able to have an idea and then create it with your hands out of obscurity, out of the ether, and into reality,” she admits. “It’s like a somatic therapy for me. Sculpture, paper making, painting, movement arts, performance art—all of them help me explore these concepts that I’ve arrived at in my music in more minute and immature ways that then get to evolve in that medium and back into music.”

Tether isn’t necessarily bound by genre—there are moments of blistering overwhelm mixed with shimmering whimsi-goth acoustics, synths take as central a role as the guitars—but the poeticism, composition, and narrative storytelling all fall under the greater folk umbrella. Annahstasia potently aligns her songwriting with familiar tenets: simplicity, emotion, collective experience. “The musicality of it doesn’t matter so much, but I would say that the basis of folk, to me, is the simplicity of the song, the democratic nature of the music,” she explains. “It’s the pop music of our collective memory: what is currently going on and what we are dealing with in the human condition right now.” Community, connection, experience, humanity—these are the throughlines that resonate through Tether, instilled in every part of Annahstasia’s craft, from the record’s emotional architecture to the energy behind each song.

The past few months have brought even more attention to her. In April, she co-starred in the “luther” music video alongside Kendrick Lamar—a video that, in the last two months, has garnered nearly 30 million views online. Go into the comments on any of Tether’s music videos, and you’re likely to find someone who says that “luther” brought them there. I ask if she feels that increased exposure, and how it compares to her years of seclusion. “I think that it’s just my luck that, at the same time that I’m finding ways to release this music, celebrity is also dying, so I might fall nicely into that crevice where I get to put out this music,” she responds. “And I also still get to sit in some random shop in Brooklyn and have a meal and nobody bothers me” (She’d just sat down at the counter at an uncharacteristically empty Rule of Thirds, a Greenpoint staple around the corner from Dream Fishing Tackle.)

Growing up in Los Angeles kept Annahstasia from being disillusioned by the idea of fame. “You’re watching the fragility of the hype machine,” she reckons. “You’re watching people come and go so fast. One second, they’re full of hype. The next second, you haven’t heard from them in a year, and you don’t know what they’re doing, where they are.” Rather than instant celebrity, Annahstasia is after longevity. “The one thing I don’t want is for me to put all of my blood, sweat, and tears into something and for it to get forgotten three months later. So it informs the type of work that I’m doing. I’m looking for legacy. I’m creating within a concept of time that is 100 years long—not a year long. I want this record to be something that people revisit long after I’m gone.” It’s about being felt rather than being seen. And that kind of presence can stretch far beyond her time.

Annahstasia: The Best of What’s Next