Album Review: Ladyhawke - Anxiety

There's a strong undercurrent of the album's title on Ladyhawke's second album. It's not something that is easy to put your finger on, but from the opening bars of the first track, Girl Like Me, there's something anxious and even paranoid-sounding about the New Zealand artist's undeniable pop masterpiece.

When she sings “Please don't go, I need your love” on Sunday Drive, there is a desperation and fragility in her voice that removes the cliché from the song. The confidence and strength of the songs and their production is constantly at odds with the lyrical vulnerability. Black White & Blue sounds like a galactic celebration, but the lyrics are upsetting and unclear, like the fast-fading memories of a bad dream that slip from your memory as you wake leaving you confused as to why you feel so shit. Despite the cheerleader style “na na na na”s on Blue Eyes, there's an imploring request to try and forget the past despite it following you to your grave, and she begs the listener to notice her pain. Paranoia informs The Quick And The Dead – even instrumentally it invokes the image of being followed or chased, complete with heavy breathing.

The title track, Anxiety, deals directly with anxiety as an illness, referencing medication, loneliness and an endless depression – “Show me how to hide the voice in my head” she begs. In the epic power ballad pop of Cellophane – the album's highlight – she asks to be taken somewhere, anywhere but here. Thematically it's a heavy record, almost disturbingly so, with Ladyhawke's exquisitely formulaic pop songwriting hiding the pain on the surface, but only just.