Anyx has released Starlink, the first album under a name Anna Lucia Nissen took up after her years singing in the Anchoress. The Quietus reviewed it on 28 August, with Amanda Farah describing a record that keeps a streak of hope running through some very sombre tones.
The title came from Nissen mistaking the branded satellites for stars, and she knew it would make some people wince. The name carries the awkwardness of infrastructure that is genuinely useful and that also enriches somebody unpleasant, and that friction suits the project. Across the album she works at balancing harsh sounds against soft ones, defiance against optimism, and organic sources against manufactured ones.
Anyx reads as a more individual continuation of the work Nissen did with her band rather than a break from it. Starlink was written with her former bandmates, but the musical and lyrical ideas are tighter and more concise, and they sound like decisions one person made rather than a collective settlement.
Her voice is the thing the songs are built around. The throaty timbre is recognisable inside a bar, and what marks her out on her own is restraint: the arrangements are stripped back rather than piled up, and even the buzzy guitars that run through the record sit behind the vocal instead of over it.
The album opens on a crush of guitar and then spends most of its length in subtleties. Window in Your Eyes is a goth folktale that begins on finger-picked acoustic guitar and shifts without ceremony to harp and hollowed-out drums. An almost imperceptible drone hums under Strange Times, with church bells pulling focus, and carries faintly into Spring Birds.
Spring Birds is austere spoken word delivered in a whisper, with a looped exhale of Nissen's own breath rattling through it and on into Sucker, which builds slowly into a gloomy rock track with percussion that ricochets between the ears on headphones. It would be easy to file the whole thing as bleak, and that would miss the drive in it: the refrain of opener Ladybird's Spine, "While we wait for better times to come", implies she believes they will.
Starlink files under indie, and the rest of the week's releases sit on the release calendar.
The facts
- Starlink is the first solo album by Anna Lucia Nissen as Anyx
- Nissen sang in the band the Anchoress before starting the project
- Her former bandmates helped write the songs on Starlink
- The title came from mistaking Starlink satellites for stars
- The Quietus reviewed the album on 28 August 2026
- Track titles include Window in Your Eyes, Spring Birds and Sucker
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