Anna Calvi - Hunter

The Quietus

Hunter is a hedonist’s call to dismantle normative ideas surrounding gender, and a vivid rumination on primal desire. The title track and lead single is a breathy seduction, pulsating with ecstatic synths and muddy guitar distortions. Calvi’s sound is richly cinematic – you can see the light playing on the water in the shimmering harp sounds of ‘Swimming Pool’, which rises to the orchestral heights of Busby Berkeley’s synchronised swimming beauties, and the windscreen wipers in the racing urgency of ‘Wish’, as if driving breakneck through a downpour in the throes of an all-consuming obsession.

The legacy of female-led British punk comes through, with essences of Lene Lovich in Calvi’s vocals on ‘Indies Or Paradise’, a track that kicks off with a hint of X-Ray Spex’s ‘Germfree Adolescence’. After the edgy, melodramatic intensity of the first two-thirds of Hunter, a break comes in the emotional detachment of ‘Away’. With its acoustic, gentle melody, it’s a bittersweet song of release, but the softness steadily gives in to a melancholic ache of loss. The jewel of the album, though, is ‘Don’t Beat The Girl Out of My Boy’, in all of its ethereal Cocteau Twins-esque gothic rock. Calvi howls up a storm as she defies the gendering that society imposes from an early age, imploring “let us be us”. Hunter is a tempestuous album full of haunting, unsettling vocals; it resonates with evocative power.

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Pitchfork 78

On her first album in five years, the goth-rock guitar virtuoso abandons her typically detached perspective to ruminate on gender, sexuality, and identity with newfound urgency.

The Guardian 60

(Domino)

Anna Calvi is a dramatic performer, armed with a fearsome guitar sound and a voice that can pivot from languorous to carnivorous in a heartbeat. Her songs, however, can struggle to match those raw materials, remaining true to a generic, brooding aesthetic that has played out better, many times, elsewhere. Nick Launay, Nick Cave’s go-to producer of the past 15 years, mans the desk for Calvi’s third effort, Hunter, where she still struggles to throw off what must now be very tiresome PJ Harvey comparisons.

That said, this is very much a resonant record, set in the here and now, with melodies to the fore. Hunter is red in tooth and claw, rending gender assumptions asunder and casting Calvi as an Alpha (“I divide and conquer!”), on a song that hymns female lust via finger-clicks and a gutsy six-string squall. Don’t Beat the Girl Out of My Boy evens it up for the guys.