Review Summary: Oh Anna, you beautiful soul, you've done it yet again.
Anna von Hausswolff has always been such an integral artist for me personally ever since I discovered her music in 2018 with the release of (her magnum opus)
Dead Magic. That album made me fall instantly in love with Anna's ability to take droning, ethereal darkwave music and blend it serenely with calming post-rock and eerily frightening dark ambient backdrops. Most of her previous albums were chock-full of similar types of uneasy, cult-like hymns that had you wondering if you were listening to some sort of dark ritual in progress.
Iconoclasts is pretty much a complete 180 from any of Anna's previous output. That may scare some long time fans, but let this fellow Anna lover ease your mind because this album is pure bliss.
Instead of the more stripped-back, semi-minimalist approach of previous releases, Anna dives head first into more of an ambient-adjacent, jazzy art rock core for this one. ‘The Iconoclast’ is an 11-minute long behemoth of airy tribal atmospheres, anxiety-ridden post-rock buildups, mysterious 80's sounding synth work that sounds like it could've come straight from a Kate Bush-inspired Stranger Things soundtrack and even some gorgeous saxophone at the very end. Anna's vocals reverberate in the background that sounds as if she's conjuring up the souls of uneasy spirits. The main thing about this album that differs from previous releases is that while a lot of this is still pretty dark and haunting, the production really makes everything sound so free, gleeful and almost angelic.
Iggy Pop and Ethel Cain both also make appearances here, on ‘The Whole Woman’ and ‘Aging Young Women’ respectively. The former is a slowcore-esque ballad with a nice tradeoff between Anna's high-pitched vocal melodies mixing perfectly with Iggy's deep, unsettling crooning. The latter is a top-tier track on the album as well, showing such undeniable chemistry between Anna and Ethel. It focuses on, you guessed it, the feeling of fear that women (and people in general) get as they age. This track follows a super minimal approach similar to Ethel's solo work complete with church organs and droning baptist-sounding ambience.
There are some tracks here that harken back to the pitch-black, unnerving atmospheres of the past. ‘The Mouth’ is a dismally bleak track in the best way possible with a static-inducing white noise as Anna's ghostlike vocals echo at the listener from all angles. I mean, I could really keep going on for days about all the neat, different aspects of this album. Another track like ‘Stardust’ really leans into an upbeat, jazzy krautrock sound with spacey synth work and groovy drumming before transitioning into a monumental, albeit not quite long enough, saxophone solo that Coltrane would be proud of. In fact, the saxophone is extremely prevalent throughout a lot of this album. ‘Consensual Neglect’ sounds so smooth that it would be perfectly at home in a 1950's jazz club while all the patrons close their eyes and enjoy the soundscapes.
‘Struggle With the Beast’ starts the back-to-back of the two best songs on the album and is a chaotic blend of jazz rock and, once again, krautrock-influenced grooves and keys. It almost gives off 60's Jefferson Airplane vibes with a druggy, psychedelic effect that would make hippies want to light a joint and dance naked. ‘An Ocean of Time’ follows and is, simply put, a dark ambient masterpiece and my overall favorite out of all the bangers here. This track is the most similar to her previous stuff, pulling the listener in with a minimalist and desolate feeling of claustrophobia. Anna's terrifying vocals glide over an organ that sounds like the start to a morbid funeral. This song is truly haunting and straight-up scary at times.
All of the different influences on
Iconoclasts just blend so well and it never sounds messy. She takes some of the old and blends it with modern times to create what is, in my opinion, her second best album, only behind the aforementioned
Dead Magic. Anna is probably my favorite female solo artist and her output has been consistent from the very beginning. She has shown the ability to experiment with many genres while still being true to herself and she has thrived in doing so. She hasn't released anything even close to mediocre and just keeps topping herself time and time again. It's time that Anna gets some more recognition on a larger scale because she certainly deserves it.
