Becoming The Hunter

“I really wanted to take my time to write something I could stand behind.”

Anna Calvi isn’t concerned with binaries. In fact, on the British guitarist and songwriter’s third album, Hunter, Calvi defiantly explores the in-betweens, the grey areas, and the complexities of the body, pointing towards the revolutionary potential of somatic pleasure.

Originally a classically trained violinist, Calvi first began to garner widespread attention with her debut album, the eponymous Anna Calvi in 2011. Released to critical acclaim, it was shortly followed by One Breath in 2013. With her distinctive voice and virtuosic guitar-playing, both albums would go on to receive Mercury Prize nominations. Prior to Hunter, Calvi’s most recent release was 2014’s Strange Weather, a collection of covers by the likes of David Bowie and FKA Twigs, with David Byrne of Talking Heads collaborating on a number of tracks.

Writing Hunter was a long project for Calvi, who began writing for the record back in 2014, taking the time to develop the songs. It was important, she explains to take the process slowly, allowing space to articulate how she felt.

“I felt that there was so much noise in the world,” says Calvi. “I really wanted to take my time to write something I could stand behind. I was almost imagining that, if this were to be the last thing I ever wrote, I wanted to make sure it really expressed something honest and true. Something that I’m passionate about.”

Freedom is one of the record’s most visible recurring motifs, both in a personal sense and on a societal level. Through this, the body becomes a site of resistance on Hunter – spitting in the face of rigid social constructs by actively seeking out bodily agency and pleasure.

“It’s about imagining a woman as a hunter, as opposed to how we usually see them – as the hunted.”

“It’s about looking for pleasure and feeling free; trying to find a sense of freedom from any kind of restraint you might feel. It’s about imagining a woman as a hunter, as opposed to how we usually see them – as the hunted in our culture. It’s about a woman who is the protagonist in her own story.”

Indeed, the album’s title Hunter is an attempt to subvert a term often associated with masculine predation and dominance into one that refers to individual autonomy, and the idea of searching, regardless of one’s gender.

“I feel language is a really important way of how we see the world. It kind of mirrors our culture, the language we use. I feel frustrated that strength has always been considered a masculine trait, when a lot of the strongest people I know are women. Women often have to be very strong. The idea that a hunter shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a male was important, I felt.”

Calvi is critical of the pressure by society to perform gendered stereotypes, expressing a desire to be shapeless; an energy rather than a solid.

“For a woman, the pressures to perform her femininity are very restrictive. It’s the idea you have to be a certain way; you have to perfect and mild and accommodating. It’s very restrictive, in the same way that I think a lot of the pressures to be on men to be strong and never vulnerable are very restrictive. They’re so unattainable, these notions of what women can be.”

These archaic notions are directly challenged on lead single ‘Don’t Beat The Girl Out Of My Boy’. With its rousing cry “I shout out / let us be us”, it’s a powerful anthem to the rebellion of living openly in one’s body, dedicated to the joy of existing outside of society’s arbitrary, pre-conceived ideas about identity.

“It’s about the defiance of happiness,” says Calvi of the song. “How when you’re with someone that you love and you feel happy in that moment, it almost feels like a shield from any negativity. The idea of just being free to define yourself however you wish and not how society has decided to assign you.”

In 2018, making loud, bold declarations about finding power in existing in the unknown feels more needed than ever. As conservatives set their sights on gender non-conformity as the new target for moralistic outrage, art that affirms the breaking down of those barriers has been vital.

However, while there has been a cultural shift towards recognizing the ambiguity of gender expression, the idea that gender is a spectrum rather than two discrete categories is still contentious for many.

“Anything that could deconstruct this structure we’ve all learned to live in, this heteronormative patriarchal structure, is scary for some people,” Calvi explains.

“Maybe it’s because people need to see things in a very black and white way, in the same sense we need to believe there’s good and evil, and anything in a grey area to some people is hard to quantify and hard to understand.”

“The singers I really love are those who give more of themselves in their music than maybe is healthy.”

As a whole, Hunter feels noticeably more amplified, more visceral than the more polished, refined approach Calvi took on One Breath. Embodying the album’s themes of vulnerability as strength, Calvi’s guitar and voice feel like they’re being pushed to their limits on this record – they’re free and unrestrained while retaining the guitarist’s trademark art-pop sensibilities. It’s hard to believe that Calvi didn’t begin singing until the age of 23, having forced herself to conquer a life-long shyness.

“I definitely wanted this record to feel visceral,” says Calvi: she wanted the album not to feel cerebral, instead prioritizing emotionality and rawness. “Because of the album’s [lyrical] themes, of wanting it to be wild and free, I really wanted the music to be something primal too. I really tried to make the voice and guitar express a sense of freedom.”

That primal nature is present throughout the album. Tracks like ‘Alpha’ emanate with a raw and subversive sexuality, Calvi crooning over a swirling, smoky backdrop of guitars and piano.

Given the epic, dramatic nature of the songs on Hunter, it makes sense that it’s important for Calvi to translate that energy into a live environment. She recently debuted a number of songs from the album across a handful of European shows. “It’s been really great”, says Calvi about the performances.

“For me, the record’s very much about contrasts: between extreme strengths and extreme vulnerabilities, beautiful and harsh. I really wanted to take those extremes onto the stage. Because it’s a record about the body, I really wanted to express that onstage and use my whole body.

“Before now, I used to stand quite still and deliver the songs. This time I have a runway going into the audience, so I’m very intimate and very close to the audience. It’s very powerful, but very vulnerable for both the audience and for me. It’s gone down really amazingly: it feels like a very powerful show.”

When it comes to inspiration, Calvi has previously cited singers like Edith Piaf and Maria Callas – artists who threw everything they had into what they were singing. They are not unrealistic comparisons to Calvi herself, whose distinctive voice has never sounded better than on Hunter.

“The singers I really love are those who give more of themselves in their music than maybe is healthy. Singers who really push themselves. You feel that you’re hearing their humanity, and that seems quite primal in the way they sing. I want to be that kind of performer myself – otherwise it doesn’t seem worth doing.” ■