For most of her career, Ana Roxanne has kept her voice at a careful distance — buried in tape hiss, looped into abstraction, dissolved into the ambient fog she built around herself. It was beautiful, but it was also a kind of armor. On ‘Poem 1’, released May 1 on Kranky, she takes the armor off. What’s underneath is one of the most quietly startling records of the year.
The nine-track album opens with “The Age of Innocence,” and the shift is immediate: a hazy synth drifts in, familiar enough, but then Roxanne’s voice cuts through it — clear, present, unmistakably in the room with you. The words she chose to open the album feel deliberate to the point of being a manifesto: “I wanted to travel / Home into somewhere,” she breathes, before arriving at “I wanted to try / And go very far.” After years of releasing music that seemed to half-hope nobody would notice, that’s a statement. The rest of the album follows through on it.
‘Poem 1’ was recorded across four different studios — XL Recordings Studio in New York, La Piscina in Brooklyn, Gary’s Electric Studio, and the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, where Roxanne studied — and the patchwork geography shows in the best way. The record has the feeling of a document assembled over time, across different rooms and different emotional states. Baba Stiltz, who mixed the album, is credited in sleeve notes as having helped carry the project to the finish line as co-producer and contributor on several tracks, his presence lending subtle low-end shimmer to “Berceuse in A-flat Minor, Op. 45” and keeping its sedate piano and whisper-soft vocals from floating away entirely. Joshua Eustis handled the mastering, and the result is a record that sounds intimate without sounding small.
The tracklist moves through grief in rough chronological order — separation, a period of quiet numbness (the interlude “x” strips everything back to near-silence at track four), and then the attempt to move on. “Keepsake” is a jazz-toned piano ballad, spare and late-night in atmosphere; “Untitled II” conjures the same foggy midnight atmosphere she used to build from field recordings and tape loops, only this time with a brushed drum kit and sparse piano doing the heavy lifting. The most unexpected detour is “One Shall Sleep,” in which she interprets Robert Schumann’s lied “Stille Tränen” — a 19th-century poem by Justinus Kerner — layering the text over syrupy synthesizers and strings, turning someone else’s 200-year-old grief into a vessel for her own. Before the album closes, “Cover Me” arrives as a choral standout, its acapella-rooted harmonies lifting the mood toward something like hope.
The album closes with “Atonement,” and here Roxanne’s long-cited admiration for Alicia Keys finally surfaces without any filter. It’s the first time she’s sounded genuinely soulful — her R&B instincts, usually refracted through so many layers of ambient texture that you’d never trace them back to their source, come through plainly and without apology. She provides her own backing vocals, harmonizing with herself: “Running, running alone…” It’s a small thing that lands with surprising weight.
Roxanne started distributing music in 2015, quietly passing her debut EP to a circle of friends with no press, no announcements — half-hoping it would go unnoticed. It mostly did, until Leaving Records co-founder Matthewdavid heard it and reissued it in 2019. The positive reception led to ‘Because of a Flower’ in 2020, and then in 2023 she stepped sideways into a collaborative project with DJ Python under the name Natural Wonder Beauty Concept — a detour that proved she could hold her own in stranger sonic territory. Still, across all of it, she kept her voice at arm’s length. ‘Poem 1’ feels like the end of that hesitation. The title implies there’s more to come — a “Poem 2” sitting somewhere in the future — and for once, that prospect doesn’t feel like a tease. It feels earned.
