BACKSTORY: After escaping a major label deal she inked as a teenager, Annahstasia emerges fully formed on her debut LP, Tether
FROM: Los Angeles
YOU MIGHT KNOW HER FROM: Her 2024 reintroduction to music, the Surface Tension EP
NOW: After a few false starts, she delivers a stunning jazz-folk-soul opus examining the mystical underbelly of human interconnectivity
To call Annahstasia a perfectionist isn’t quite right. Every song she records is in pursuit of creating something eternal and transcendent, sure, but labeling her as an artist tied to some unwieldy and indefinable standard goes against the very ethos of her songwriting process. For instance, she recorded her stunning debut album Tether not once, not twice, but three times. Was this a process of perfection? Technically, I guess. But it was something more spiritual than analytical, a constant grasp for something truer—regardless of what was technically correct.
It led her to this: holding a stunning folk-jazz-soul epic built around Stas’ gorgeous voice and pinpoint arrangements. The recordings are so intimate you practically feel like you’re in the room with her, able to hear the breaths between notes, the delicate punch of piano keys and fingers sliding up and down an acoustic fretboard. This is a world meticulous in practice but free-flowing in execution, a perfect balance of strenuous attention to detail and whimsy. “The first time I made the album it was just bedroom demos to try and get support, and then the second time was proper, with my band,” Annahstasia explains via Zoom from Los Angeles. “The acoustics weren’t right, the engineering wasn’t right, and I had to scrap that entire thing. This third time, though, everything worked.”
Scrapping an entire album isn’t an easy decision. “It’s hard to be the one to tell the rest of the band that we’re scrapping it, especially because they’re my friends and they’re doing me favors in the recording process.” she explains. “To just be like, ‘It wasn’t right, guys’—that sucks. But I’m so glad that everybody has a lot of faith in me and my process and knows that when it’s right, it’s really right.”
“I’m so glad that everybody has a lot of faith in me and my process and knows that when it’s right, it’s really right.”
Within the context of this version of Tether, it’s easy to hear how previous iterations of the album might not have received Annahstasia’s approval, considering how the sonics are a main character in the proceedings. Take the opener “Be Kind,” which begins with Annahstasia singing from a deep and heavy place, mirroring the skipping, rhythmic guitar melody with her delivery. There’s silence and patience between each phrasing, a back-and-forth that becomes a conversation when woodwinds delicately enter the room. It’s gentle yet still powerful, either about to break or run through a brick wall. “And I deserve to rest in a California king bed / My arms outstretched and my dreams bleeding from my head / Into the sheets,” she sings—a great reminder that a good night’s sleep truly conquers all.
As for her writing process, Annahstasia credits her early days as a teenager in the major label system, practically the only useful aspect of that traumatizing aspect of her career. “I learned from these Motown writers when I was 17, 18, 19 how to sit down and to write a song. I still use some of those techniques and I’m grateful to have had that lesson,” she explains, quick to note how only some of those experiences inform her current practice. “I find that as a folk singer, a lot of the good stories you just have to wait around for.”
Now independent and signed to Ghostly International offshoot drink sum wtr, Annahstasia is honoring her unique and specific vision with Tether. It’s an experience that takes focus to receive all its riches, but it’s an exercise that’s more than worth it. “I’m just a passionate person. I think everything that I do, I do with a certain level of intensity,” she explains. It’s this intensity that animates many of Tether’s great moments.
“I find that as a folk singer, a lot of the good stories you just have to wait around for.”
These standouts are both tethered (forgive the pun) to reality and constantly searching for a better world, an imagined place crafted through song that eliminates the ills and alienation that course through this record. For this mode of songwriting, she looked outside of the medium entirely. “Octavia Butler was very present during the songwriting process,” she explains. “I was reading through most of her catalog of novels and a lot of her speculative fiction. Her writing is very intense, but there’s an honesty about humanity in it that I think was really helpful to my songwriting process because I’m always trying to get to the core of our situation with my writing.”
That idea is readily apparent in the six minute closer “Believer,” a crunchy rock cut that lands somewhere between Big Thief and Nick Cave. “And maybe where I go I can’t take ya all the way,” she sings with an astounding growl. She then asks: “Does that mean I’m only loyal if we stay the same?” It’s a question of growth and independence, two themes that give the album its life force. It’s also one that Annahstasia is intent on leaving unanswered, preferring to let it linger with the reverb and swells that gently fade away as “Believer” concludes the album. All that’s left is the silence and a palpable awe at what just was. FL
