Back in 2021, we wrote about Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and producer Anjali Rose with the release of her album Shadow Works. The record offered “a balance between sadness and grace that levels out as a kind of stillness,” we described in our review. “This duality exists at the heart of Shadow Works, the different speeds of inside and out juxtaposed and competing.” Something brought to life via a distinctive combination of folk, electronic and experimental sensibilities, resulting in a sound that strained against convention to instead speak from the heart.
Now Anjali Rose is back with ‘Sovereignty’, her first new song in four years and one which applies the same level of nuance to the chaos of the contemporary moment. It’s stripped-back like a folk song, but so much more than that, flickering with electric charge and often dissipating behind ambient textures both hazy and ominous, with samples of things like gun shots punctuating the distortion. The song is “one’s woman’s experience of surviving in The United States in 2026,” as Anjali Rose herself puts it, and it’s clear the experience is as disorientating as it is dismaying. Her vocals snake like smoke through an atmosphere thick with turbulent intensity, delivering sparse, opaquely poetic lyrics that capture the sense of societal disarray perfectly. “This is my first release in four years,” she continues, “and the act of sharing it is in itself a practice of vulnerability, learning, momentum, and growth.”
You dont own me
And I am not this fear
More than a body
More than just these years
The single comes complete with a video filmed by SoundSolstice and Anjali Rose Kumar:
‘Sovereignty’ is out now and available via the Anjali Rose Bandcamp page.
