Anna Calvi – “Swimming Pool” (Feat. Julia Holter)
Tomorrow, the intense and confrontational UK artist Anna Calvi will release her new project Hunted. It’s not a straight-up album, exactly. Instead, Hunted is a record full of reworkings and reconsiderations of songs from Calvi’s 2018 LP Hunter. She’s stripped those songs down to bare bones, making them stark and intimate. And on at least a few of those reworkings, she’s brought in some of her peers to help out.
We’ve already posted two of those reworkings: “Don’t Beat The Girl Out Of My Boy,” with Courntey Barnett, and “Eden,” with Charlotte Gainsbourg. Today, Calvi has shared a third. She’s remade the Hunter song “Swimming Pool” with help from the singer and composer Julia Holter.
The original “Swimming Pool,” from 2018, was a sort of siren hymn, a seduction song that might’ve also had lethal intent: “Shadows of light/ Shadows divide on the earth/ Come down to the swimming pool.” In its original form, “Swimming Pool” sounded a bit like a James Bond theme, full of dramatic string swells. On the new version, it’s much sparer, and Calvi and Holter’s voices get a whole lot of room to wrap themselves around each other. Their harmonies are pretty gorgeous. Check out both the Holter-assisted new version of “Swimming Pool” and the 2018 original below.
Hunted is out 3/6 on Domino.