Annahstasia – Surface Tension

Today, rising multidisciplinary artist Annahstasia announces her forthcoming EP Surface Tension, due November 1st via Secretly affiliate label drink sum wtr.

As an initial preview of the EP, she’s also sharing her new single, “Stress Test,” along with an accompanying lyrical visualizer.

The song marks the start of a new era in Annahstasia’s artistry, following last year’s self-released EP, Revival.

“Stress Test” embodies her soulful, poetic folk songcraft with impeccable vocal control and haunting melodies. Sparse instrumentation gradually swells around her guitar – first keys, then bass, saxophone, and percussion, as she finds an apt symbol in the rarest gems – not diamonds, with their fabricated value in culture, but amber and pearls, the ones that require life.  Annahstasia’s powerhouse voice reverberates through “Stress Test,” which hints at the spectrum of love navigated throughout Surface Tension and her forthcoming debut album, due next year.

Speaking on the significance of “Stress Test” Annahstasia shares, “The Universe tests you to see if you break. To see if you’ve learned your lessons. This song is about the games we play with each other in the process both consciously and unconsciously. The residual of every heartbreak and trauma becomes a part of you from the moment it happens, going forward. So you can’t change that, but you have all this new information. What will you do with it?”

Born Annahstasia Enuke, the LA-based artist first learned about the importance of artistic resilience and creative intention at the age of 17 after being discovered and later propelled into the entertainment industry and the stifling pressures that accompany it. “I’ve come into the power of my voice as a medium,” she says. “As a tool of expression, I am able to shape the emotional space around me.” Recorded at the storied Shangri-la studio in Malibu with producer Jason Lader in collaboration with a range of accomplished musicians, Surface Tension finds Annahstasia at her most intentional. She’s embracing a slower sound across the project’s three-part structure, tracing the unsustainable nature of past relationships, what she calls, “a romantic war.” Sessions were both measured and spontaneous, in a setting she’d dreamt of for years, yielding open-hearted material with vocals left up-front as she explored the capacity of her gift with newfound artistic latitude.

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