Supernova

“Time is slipping away from me,” sings Anni B Sweet in the closing minutes of Universo por estrenar (Subterfuge, ‘19). But in her escape she has left behind this stellar explosion in the shape of twelve songs (thirteen, actually), the first she has written and sung in Spanish, dressed in retro synthesizers, dreamy psychedelia and the production of James Bagshaw (Temples).

“I feel very much at ease. Now I really would say I’m in the place where I wanted to be.”

The idea of singing in Spanish was something that had been on the mind of the Malaga-born Ana López for years. Even on her debut album, Start, Restart, Undo (‘09), she ventured into it briefly with “Tumbado en mi moqueta azul,” though she is quick to point out that the song wasn’t hers, but César Fernández’s, then a member of the now-defunct The Melocotons. “I’d already thought about it for Chasing Illusions (‘15), but it never quite fell into place. I like to see an album as a whole, and at that point what I was working on didn’t call for it. But as soon as I finished that album I started focusing on writing everything in Spanish, and I moved away from English a bit; I even stopped watching series and films in their original language. Two years ago I already had a bunch of songs, but some of them were also in English, so I didn’t know whether to mix the two or go all in on one side. When I talked it over with my closest friends, they told me both ideas were fine as long as they fit together, but the truth is the ones in English didn’t have the same feel, so I decided to do it all in Spanish.” That’s how she stepped into “a new room,” where she has found no shortage of surprises, and also some difficulties. “In English it’s easier for me to fit the words into a melody, while in Spanish I had to find the right term, one that also sounded good; at times I’ve had to sacrifice a word I found prettier for another that fit better.”

She then began working on demos in the basement of her house, with a sound that harks back to the sixties and seventies, though filtered through a contemporary lens, leaning heavily on psychedelia as well as dream-pop ballads that let the listener drift away, bringing to mind names like Tame Impala, Pond, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Melody’s Echo Chamber and Temples — whose leader, James Bagshaw, she contacted to finish the production of Universo por estrenar in London. “I had that sound so clearly in mind that it couldn’t have been any other way. I’ve always been very insecure about recording with someone I don’t know at all, but his messages gave me a really good feeling, and I could also tell he’d understood the pre-production. Chasing Illusions was cleaner, in the sense that everything is more crystalline, whereas these songs have more noise, more grain. Then, when it came to choosing the effects, the idea was for the voice to feel like it was floating.”

That sense of hanging suspended in the void also fits with lyrics in which space, the stars and science — her subject says that during this period she has been deep into a book on quantum physics — play a decisive role, as they already did on tracks from her previous work such as Onyx Stars. “It’s a subject that has always inspired me a lot, a way of escaping; knowing how the world and everything around us works is mind-blowing, and so is the mystery of the things we don’t understand. If we’d had well-taught science classes at school — and I’m sure there are such classes — it’s the kind of thing that leaves you wide-eyed.” Along the way, the monsters of her early years, though some memory of them remains — as in the hidden track that appears at the end of the album, a nod to herself and also to those who already came across it during her recent acoustic shows — give way to doubts, with a more reflective tone on questions like the passage of time. “I think it all comes from the same place: when you ask yourself questions that won’t have an easy answer, that helps you when it comes to writing a song. ¿Qué hago aquí?, for example, is full of question marks, because with this album I get the feeling I’m opening my mind toward a place I hadn’t visited much, but where I feel very much at ease. Just as with the previous one I said it was a kind of transition, now I really would say I’m in the place where I wanted to be.”

Ten years later

The release of Universo por estrenar coincides with the tenth anniversary of the launch of Start, Restart, Undo, Anni B Sweet’s delicate debut. A birthday the Malaga native celebrated earlier in the year at Subterfuge’s traditional Stereoparty. “It was tricky reconnecting with the songs on that album, because I’d been so deep into the new material. Rehearsing them, I was surprised I hadn’t forgotten them. It also stirs something in you, certain memories surface, for better and for worse…” Looking back, she says, there is above all a lesson learned. “It was necessary to go through these stages. Each record has something different and reflects a particular moment. On one I learned to play guitar better, on another to use different drum rhythms… But if I look at it from a distance, I see a trajectory I feel good about.”

Text: Enrique Peñas · Source: MondoSonoro no. 9, May 2019.