Ana Roxanne

Stay still for Ana Roxanne’s languid and stately songs of disappointment and self-definition. As a way of life and work, Roxanne moves slowly; the results are as absorbing as time itself. Roxanne grew up on the California coast in a Filipino family where soul oldies and modern R&B wafted through the house. She sang in a Catholic school choir, studied jazz singing in remote Iowa, learned Hindustani vocal styles in India, and eventually made her way back to California and Mills College, a locus of experimental composition and electronic music for decades. Still, nearly a decade passed before she released her debut album on Kranky Records, 2020’s Because of a Flower, a spellbinding and imaginative contemplation of her life as an intersex person. There were luxurious drones, playful samples, and beautiful songs that seemed as expansive and wondrous as the horizon at dusk.

Back when Roxanne released Because of a Flower, she said she hoped it wouldn’t take five years to finish its follow-up. It took six, but the wait was not just worthwhile—it was also transformative. On Poem 1, her 2026 album of glacial electronics and graceful piano, Roxanne considers what it is to lose someone or something and gradually find her own way forward. “I wanted to try/and go very far,” she sings over icy synths near the start, her supple voice unfurling in long and fluid lines. “A new life that had yet to be/Want something, it never was.” But at the end, on a staggering piece of experimental soul called “Atonement,” she sings of “running forward and looking ahead,” the drums pushing her onward—slowly, yes, but also certainly.