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The Anchoress: The Art of Losing review – giving voice to her grief

As a drawn-to-the-dark teen, the Welsh singer-songwriter Catherine Anne Davies, AKA the Anchoress, subscribed to the notion that great art must be born of pain. Recent times brought her unwelcome opportunity to thoroughly test the theory: the death of her father, the loss of several pregnancies, and a cervical cancer diagnosis. Her second album dramatises the fight to pull some meaning clear.

The slinky, thunking Unravel shifts its rhythms under your feet, as stabbing strings and drowning-deep Cure guitars pursue Davies through sleepless nights. “How much more can she take?/ One more child/ One more rape” asks the title track, amid tumbling drums and sci-fi synths. Death often comes tangled in other kinds of, specifically female, trauma here: The Exchange, a duet with Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield, evokes the fray of a fraught, unhealthy relationship, while Show Your Face summons the spectre of abuse and harassment, With the Boys that of industry misogyny.

These dark energies have been beautifully wrangled in an album bookended by interludes of moonlit piano that often leans lushly into 60s classicism in the quiet between squalls. In its second half, Paris recalls the other voices heard by the drowning woman in Kate Bush’s Waking the Witch, as Davies’s friends read snatches of Psalm 102 over soft, reflective piano. It lulls you ready for 5am, which reflects on domestic abuse, sexual assault and the loss of a child, linked by the image of dripping blood: it takes its time, keys painfully slow and delicate, and leaves its mark. Its final words are “I can’t speak”, yet Davies has given a powerful, challenging voice to her grief. Great music doesn’t necessarily come from great suffering, but if you’ve the strength for the job, it certainly can.