ANYX - Starlink (2026)

You can watch a star for a fair while before it dawns on you that it’s actually travelling, albeit slowly, in a straight line. Anna Lucia Nissen spent a night under a sky she assumed was full of them before working out she was looking at Starlink satellites. Naming her debut after a billionaire’s data delivery network and its presence among ancient specks of light feels appropriate for a record that keeps catching the natural world and the capitalist one at odds with each other.

Starlink is Nissen’s first solo work as ANYX, following her time fronting Berlin trio Anchoress (NB not Catherine Davies’ The Anchoress). She brings with her bandmates Alexander Rathbone and Tobias Textor who share the writing credits, although the musical centre of gravity has shifted decisively. Trained as a visual artist, Nissen builds songs the way you’d mould something out of clay. Voice and words are assembled first like the armature, then harp, keys, guitar and double bass packed around it until it stands unaided, dark and foreboding like a golem. The old name was well chosen, mind you. An anchoress was a woman bricked into a cell against a church wall, (Julian of Norwich being the more well-known) and that combination of enclosure and unnerving authority has followed Nissen out of the trio and into this. Which brings us onto her voice.

Anyone who knows Circuit des Yeux‘s Portrait or Overdue will recognise the same low, baroque, shadowy tenacity, a tenor with something faintly predatory circling it, and the sense that the singer knows exactly how much more she could unnerve you, but is holding back for now. There’s a good deal of Anna von Hausswolff in there too. The same scale and dread and the sense of a voice built for rooms with high ceilings. Inevitably, there are other comparisons this record will attract: Nico, Anohni and Scott Walker (particularly the slow retreat from crooner to narrator on Tilt and The Drift). Where those voices tended to be monolithic, planted in the ground and impassable, Nissen’s doesn’t really hold a specific shape at all. She begins a line as one person and finishes it as somebody else entirely, and the band have little choice but to go with her.

As arresting an opening as we’ve encountered all year, this instability is heard within seconds of ‘Ladybird’s Spine’ as it first demands the room’s attention with a military drumbeat and a crumbling wall of guitar noise. Nissen starts tenderly “On the back of a Ladybird’s spine/ life seemed too much, too much for my kind”, then, a breath later that tenderness has soured: “I won’t rise to your standards, I won’t dance at your parties”. The instrumentation ebbs and halts abruptly before gradually hauling itself back up to keep pace with whoever she has become.

‘Window In Your Eyes’ grew from a chance encounter on a busy city street with a homeless person who everyone else had walked past. It builds out of sparse percussion and an arpeggio, played first on guitar and then repeated on harp, while the refrain keeps circling back to the same flat observation: “but faces turn and people pass”. Immediately afterwards she asks incredulously whether we believe in love. That’s the power of placement, putting two lines next to each other that have more impact than a sermon.

‘Spring Birds’ shifts perspective again, this time to animals imagined as messengers to a more forgiving place, asking them “will you take me where meaning lies?” Nissen is absorbed in the fantasy, her own voice processed beautifully alongside sampled birdsong until the two become almost indistinguishable. Then comes ‘Sucker’, its percussive clacks like something mechanical attempting to fly. Sucker being slang for ‘a pigeon’ and the fool who believes what he’s told – another reference to those satellites, and to us too, taken in several times a day by whatever happens to be orbiting above us or glowing its lies onto the devices in our hands.

‘Marian’ starts even more plainly. Just a voice, forthright and cold as a funerary statue, asking what’s left of us once the stories go: “will we exist outside our past – when in bones bare we stand”. Its cruellest line is delivered with a chilling, enigmatic gentleness: “They are no longer our companions. They never were, they never were.”

By contrast, closer, ‘Relic’ feels something like a consolation, if a strange one. Her voice loosens, pooling over deep reverb-laden guitars, and by its end she isn’t alone: “do you hear what they say, do you hear what they mean”. Whoever ‘they’ are, the ones she has just told us were never our companions, they demand the last word on the album. It sounds more like an ominous new beginning than a satisfying conclusion, fitting when Anyx’s songs rarely end but erode into one another, like the squall of ‘Pylon’ gnashing away until ‘Strange Times’ calms its shape.

Nissen has made something startlingly assured here, without a wasted minute, and with some room left for it to be dismantled and rebuilt in nightly performances. Interestingly, she plays Berlin’s Galiläakirche in September with Swans‘ Kristof Hahn. Gira’s rabble has built forty years on the same principle, that a song is only finished at the point it’s performed. While Swans often get there by sheer volume, Nissen holds everything together through her focus of attention: down at street level, on the people and creatures the rest of us step around while we’re all busy consuming, and being consumed. For a debut this dark, Starlink is enlightening.