"The truth is I don’t really like myself/ And the truth is I don’t really like anyone else." What better way to begin a song? Those are the first lines of Anika's breezy new tune "Walk Away," and it only gets better from there. The single is taken from her upcoming album Abyss, following last month's initial preview “Hearsay.”
“This song is saying all the things I want to say but am too scared to say or that society doesn’t accept me to say," the Berlin musician states. "It is dealing with mental health — the state of poor mental health in these fucked up, divided, isolated, social media, war, pest, rise of the right times. It is the deconstruction of the feminine — of topics considered to be private realm.”
For inspiration, she cites “the reckless nature of 90s /2000s Hole / Courtney Love records — of not giving a shit — telling it how it is, not scared to offend, not scared to be cancelled. We have also lost the space for healthy debate, for difference of opinion, shutting down those we don’t agree with, removing them from our social networks."
The song comes with a music video shot by Laura Martinova in an ex-brothel. Per Anika, the video “plays with the socially constructed ideas of femininity, of sexuality, of sexual restriction and confronts them.” She continues:
The character is quite sufficient by herself, sexually and socially liberated — and also a bit of a mess, destroying the prim and proper idea of how a good wifey should be. She is a hedonist, she lets herself go, she shows anger, she shows being drunk, she seems to enjoy dusting the pictures of the naked ladies very much, she is independent and breaking out of all the bars imposed by the patriarchy. The guy in the video never finds her, never even gets close, doesn’t in the slightest disrupt her life, he continues to look but she seems to always be a step ahead.
Watch below.
Abyss is out 4/4 via Sacred Bones.
