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1st December 2025
What does quiet radicalism sound like? For Anika, it’s unapologetically personal. From early recordings with Geoff Barrow of Portishead, to collaborative projects in Berlin and Mexico City, we explore how she continues to make music on her own terms.
Where much of the music industry chases visibility and viral trends, Anika operates quietly, deliberately, and on her own terms. Her songs don’t demand attention, yet remain intimate and defiant.
Where much of the music industry chases visibility and viral trends, Anika operates quietly, deliberately, and on her own terms. Her songs don’t demand attention, yet remain intimate and defiant.
Born Annika Henderson, Anika trained in political journalism and worked in music marketing in Cardiff, booking bands and DJing by night while navigating office life by day.
Born Annika Henderson, Anika trained in political journalism and worked in music marketing in Cardiff, booking bands and DJing by night while navigating office life by day.
In the quiet moments of those ‘long, sleep-deprived days’, she picked up a guitar and began writing ‘strange, private songs.’ They were never intended for an audience.
In the quiet moments of those ‘long, sleep-deprived days’, she picked up a guitar and began writing ‘strange, private songs.’ They were never intended for an audience.
An Unexpected Listener
Those songs found one listener, though, and almost by accident. While staying at a friend’s house in Bristol, her recordings reached Migg of The Louisiana, who in turn passed them on to Geoff Barrow of Portishead – now BEAK> and Invada Records, who has just launched his first feature film ‘Game’ through Invada Films.
The result of this surprise discovery was Anika’s eponymous debut album in 2010, surfacing as a lo-fi, instinctive record captured over sandwiches and tea, and made in opposition to the commercial polish dominating the scene. As Anika states, it was ‘a bit of an anti-record.’
Naturally very shy and never wanting to be a ‘pop star’, Anika found working with Geoff different. He was 'patient, gentle, and not creepy' – an unfortunate rarity in an industry often defined by ego and ambition. As she reflects, ‘I was 23 and thrown into photoshoots in Paris... it was hell, it was like being burnt alive.’
The ethos of those early sessions has persisted, and Anika’s music has always privileged honesty over expectation. She rarely thinks about audience or trends, confessing ‘I’m not a marketing manager for my project… I write songs I believe in and hope to share them with others.’
Her work, whether solo or in collaborative projects like, often emerges from improvisation, intuition, and experimentation – drawing from dub, post-punk, psychedelic, and electronic traditions.
Life Beyond Bristol
After recording with Geoff and briefly performing with BEAK>, Anika relocated to Berlin, a time that exposed her to the transactional side of the industry, and where connections often mattered more than the music itself.
‘People saw you as a ladder,’ she explains. ‘They’d ask for your label contact, your booker.’ Music wasn’t always the priority, and that tension eventually pushed her to Mexico City, which offered a bit of a reset – recording with local musicians in vibrant settings.
Here, Anika then hastily assembled a band, and her first album with Exploded View was completely improvised, lyrics included.
Since then, her work has continued to evolve around the same principle – making music that feels real. Collaborations with artists like Tricky (Massive Attack), Shackleton, Gudrun Gut, and Jim Jarmusch became learning experiences rather than marketing exercises.
Projects like Eat Liquid for example, explore consciousness through sound, drawing on texts adapted from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to create psychedelic states, without the use of psychedelics.
Quiet Radicalism
Even when her tone is soft, politics inevitably seep through. ‘It’s never directly about one thing,’ she says… a single song might be about my family, my evil ex, Donald Trump, and the birds dying in Brandenburg, all at once.’
While this may make her music slightly fragmented, and ‘maybe it’s self-sabotage,’ she reflects, it remains honest and deeply personal storytelling which you instantly feel connected to.
Abyss, her latest album, carves out space for that uncertainty, proving that music can resist commercial pressures while remaining uncompromising. In a era obsessed with visibility which can result in art having a very short shelf life, Anika’s work reminds us that honesty can produce something enduring and quietly transformative.
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