REVIEW: Annahstasia - Tether

I have been listening to Annahstasia since her first release in 2022 and I have been living inside her debut album Tether since June. It creeps up in the quiet hours, it demands a replay on the walk home, it settles like a soft bruise behind the sternum. Paying attention to many conversations of her talking about this album has gradually changed how I listen to it. Annahstasia thinks of her work as an act of legacy. It took six years to make this body of work but, when you think about it, six years to make an album is nothing, if you imagine six years inside hundreds. That patience is intentional. It is political in the gentlest sense: a refusal to let everything be hurried into this forgetful present.

If you listen the way I do, the album feels like a candlelit confession booth set to music. The songs lean in close, precise and vulnerable, and then at key moments they swell into communal eruptions that remind you why we share music. There are two questions that return, like prayers: how do we ask for care, and who decides whether we deserve it. Those questions are not only romantic. They are social. They are ethical.

Community and memory are the album’s quiet backbone. Annahstasia talks about extraction — about being pulled from language, land, context — and she suggests the cure is mutual remembering. Share the small things, keep accounts of kindness, make a collective memory that resists the short-term logic of power. You can hear that ethic in the arrangements. Half the time you are up close with a voice and a guitar or a cello, leaning in as if someone is telling you something true. Then, at the right moments, backing voices or brass fold into the mix and it becomes a village sound. Listen to how those choruses feel: like a crowd remembering what one person first whispered. That move, from solitude to chorus, is the album’s central argument. It asks us to practice seeing one another.

Yearning and patience thread through the record. Songs such as “Waiting” and “Satisfy Me” read as prayers disguised as folk tunes. “Waiting” places you at a train station, watching someone go and deciding to remain. The production gives you air and a steady pulse, a warm acoustic bed that makes endurance feel noble rather than tragic. “Satisfy Me” is the record’s aching centre. Annahstasia’s cry in that song is not about wanting stuff or wealth. It comes from a dreamer’s heart, someone who can imagine a kinder, more abundant world and wakes up to its absence. She sees the earth’s abundance and finds it heartbreaking that fear and survival push us toward our baser instincts. That tension echoes Blythe Baird: “I am trying to both be happy and pay attention to the world around me. I do not know if it is possible to do both at the same time.” In “Satisfy Me” the plea becomes almost sacred: proof that we are still capable of kindness, proof that we could choose connection over fear. Musically the song layers voices until loneliness becomes something shared, a communal asking rather than a private wound.

Love on Tether is not tidy. It is greedy and forgiving, bitter and tender. The record keeps returning to trust and blame, especially in songs like “Villain,” and “Take Care of Me,” and “Believer.” “Villain” refuses the single story that reduces someone to guilt. It moves from moody restraint into brass-fuelled release, as if the band is shouting back at the script that would keep us small. “Take Care of Me” is a fragile demand to be noticed before being put away, porcelain on a high shelf. These intimate moments teach us how to ask for care, and they also show how easily tenderness can be measured.

That measuring is important. In the final song she returns to the image of the ledger, to counting every nickel and dime. On the face of it, that tally corrodes intimacy, the way relationships can descend into scorekeeping. But read it a step further and it becomes a comment on a wider economy, on the grind she names in “Silk and Velvet.” The album keeps making this pivot: what feels like small interpersonal failure often mirrors political failure. The ledger is love and it is capitalism at once. We live under a system that keeps us from rest, that equates worth with output, that treats community as inefficiency. The effect is the same in the bedroom and on the factory floor. When she asks to be satisfied, she is not asking for riches. She is asking for a world that remembers its abundance.

Duality is named plainly in “Silk and Velvet.” At its core, it is not only the fear of selling out. It is the unavoidable contradiction of being human in capitalism. You want moral clarity, but you also want warmth and a bed and food. The lyric keeps that tension without pretending there is a quick fix. Productionally the track does the honest work: it starts close, restrained, then swells into near chaos, strings and distortion colliding like an argument. The music is literally disputing the lyric. That rupture is not gratuitous. It is the sound of someone naming hypocrisy and refusing both shame and self-flagellation. To say it out loud is already an act of grace.

Light and shadow keep recurring as images. A lover can be a saving grace for poison air in “Be Kind,” yet a moralism can look ugly in “Silk and Velvet.” The album prefers small domestic metaphors — the train station, the shelf, the porcelain — because that is where politics and love actually live. Time and travel appear too, in roads and trains and mountains, mapping the internal geography of someone trying to stay true while also wanting a bedrock life.

And then there is the motif of speech. She insists we say the hard thing. Tell someone, “please don’t be heartless.” Say, “take it back.” Admit, “I get lonely.” Saying it does not fix everything, but it changes the terms of the relationship. The record is less interested in tidy answers than in continued practice: speak, listen, repeat. Tend the wound. Plant the seed.

All of this is gathered into the final question, which is the album’s tender revolt. She repeats it over and over: “'cause I get lonely and I know you get lonely too, can I be lonely here with you?” It sounds simple, but it is quietly radical. She is not asking to be cured of loneliness. She is asking for permission to have it in company, to be unoptimized and still worthy of care. In a culture that measures value by productivity and punishes softness, to rest together is protest. To be allowed to carry fatigue and still be seen, that is resistance. This is honestly one of my favourite moments on the entire album. 

So, Tether is more than just your normal love album. It is love as survival and love as politics. Its small acts of confession, of asking to be cared for, of naming contradiction and planting memory, add up. The production reinforces that ethic: spare guitars and close, breathy vocals make you lean in, and when the band grows it feels like a village walking into the room to witness the confession. That movement from solitude to chorus is the album’s moral centre.

My small, selfish request is simple. Listen to Tether more than once, at different hours. Let one song be a bedside whisper and another an open field. Let “Silk and Velvet” sit with your contradictions for a while. Let “Satisfy Me” remind you of what you once imagined the world could be. Then, if you can, do one small thing: tell a story, hold a hand, remember a moment you witnessed someone else’s quiet kindness. Repeat. That practice is the tether Annahstasia is offering.