Anna B Savage - In|Flux (LP)

Anna B Savage’s second album, In|Flux, lands like a deep breath you forgot you were holding. Released on City Slang in February 2023 and produced by Mike Lindsay of Tunng and LUMP, it feels both heavier and freer than her debut. The title gives the game away. These songs sit in the messy middle of change, where old habits still tug at your sleeve and new selves begin to speak up. Savage leans into that space with a voice that can slip from a low murmur to a full body exhale, the kind that makes you look up from whatever else you were doing.

Lindsay’s production is a great match for her way of writing. Acoustic guitar and piano form the bones, but there is grit under the nails, a shiver of synth, a rustle of room noise, a drum figure that rises and then retreats. Nothing feels ornamental. It is more like the songs are letting in the weather, which suits Savage’s words, plainspoken and pointed, sometimes funny, sometimes tender to the touch. London looms in the corners, not as postcard fodder, more as the backdrop for the kind of small reckonings that make up a life.

You hear a noticeable step forward in confidence. The debut often felt like someone trying to keep the room from spinning, beautiful in its restraint. In|Flux is braver about sudden surges, dynamic swings that carry the listener the way a thought will jump tracks and become a confession. There is an elastic sense of rhythm on a few tracks, a looseness that recalls the more exploratory side of folk, and you can tell Lindsay enjoys teasing that out. People who know his work with Laura Marling in LUMP will catch the lineage, but this is Savage’s world, all the way down to the sustained tension between her low register and the silvered textures wrapped around it.

One song, “Crown Shyness,” has become a fan touchstone for a reason. The phrase describes how tree canopies leave a small space between them, and the track uses that image to get at boundaries, the near touch, the desire to close the gap. It is a neat key to the record. Again and again, she writes about the edges where bodies and histories meet, or choose not to. The lines feel lived in, never precious, and the melodies tend to land with a weight that sticks. If you have ever found yourself talking in circles in a kitchen at 2 a.m., this record will meet you there.

Critical response reflected that pull. The Guardian and Pitchfork both praised the album’s clarity of voice and the way the production lets it glow without losing texture, and the indie press rallied around it as one of the year’s most quietly gutsy singer songwriter statements. None of that matters as much as how it plays in a room, though. On a decent setup, In|Flux vinyl gives you air around the instruments and a pleasing thump in the low midrange, the kind of presentation that makes the harmonics on a nylon string guitar bloom. If you collect Anna B Savage albums on vinyl, this one rewards volume, then restraint, then volume again, a cycle that mirrors the record’s emotional ebb and flow.

What gets me is the way she writes about self interrogation without slipping into melodrama. Therapy and growth are easy clichés, but she dodges them by keeping her eye on details, the awkward joke at the wrong time, the slip of a memory that turns a day sour, the moment you realize you have to forgive yourself to get anything done. When the drums do get bolder, they do it in service of that feeling, not for a cheap crescendo. There are traces of chamber folk and art pop, yet the spine is classic songwriting, verse and chorus in service to a story, no fuss.

If you are the kind of listener who digs into the craft, there is a lot to chew on. Vocal takes feel close and unvarnished, breaths and all, and the arrangements leave space for tiny sounds that keep revealing themselves on repeat plays. If you are newly curious and thinking of where to start when you buy Anna B Savage records online, In|Flux is the smart pick, a sharper and more expansive companion to A Common Turn. Pop it on next to a few other 2023 favorites and it holds its own, then sneaks up on you again the next day.

For crate diggers, consider tracking down Anna B Savage vinyl while copies are still easy to find. I have seen In|Flux vinyl tucked away in a Melbourne record store and showing up on sites that ship vinyl records Australia wide, and it is the kind of record that becomes a weekend staple, the one you put on when the house is quiet and you are not sure yet what the day wants. It is honest music, finely made, unafraid of its own softness, and it sticks around.