This story originally appeared in i-D’s The Timeless Issue, no. 371, Spring 2023. Order your copy here.
A solitary Black woman is wandering down a sandy desert bank, across dusky horizons and standing tall against the waves rolling into a craggy coastline. These are the opening shots for singer-songwriter Annahstasia Enuke’s new music video, “Untamed”. Stas – for short – is the lone woman in the video: we gaze after her as she slips in and out of these pastoral frames, her beautiful lyrics filling the spaces in-between.
“I try to return to and be in nature as much as I can,” Stas explains over a morning Zoom from her family home in Los Angeles, “to get away from this mindset that everything can be consumed”. The lyrics for “Untamed” are derived from an experience Stas had on what she thought was an empty beach in Malibu during Covid. As a self-described Valley Girl and lone wolf, she was relishing the moment of being topless and out in nature, alone. That is until she realised that a man was watching her nearby, and “immediately it turned a beautiful moment of self-actualisation into this gross thing of questioning how someone is perceiving me.” The fear and the anger she felt led to a mediation of the fragility of liberation and how it can be so easily obliterated. “Writing ‘Untamed’ was a way of shedding all of these layers of othering,” Stas explains, “to realise that our bodies are gifts from this earth and not holes to fill, but sacred vessels carrying us around on this plane of existence every day.”
This desire for freedom also echoes Stas’s uphill battle to reach a place of autonomy as a musician. “There is a bias in the creative industries and among the public, where they think that artists have to suffer,” Stas says, “and if you suffer and suffer, then one day you’ll make it. And once you’ve ‘made it’ then miraculously it’s all fine.”
Stas’s own entrance into the music industry seemed to be the stuff that dreams are made of. At the age of seventeen, a music producer happened to hear her singing while she was waiting to get picked up by her parents from school. “This older English guy came up to me, and was just like (putting on her best Mick Jagger-esque accent) ‘do you want to be a pop star?’ One thing led to another and I ended up doing music sessions in his home studio, where he tested my vocal range by pulling up songs by Hiatus Kaiyote and Whitney Houston on YouTube, giving me twenty minutes to learn and then sing them back to him,” she says. “I was just a high school kid who sang in a choir, with no formal training!”.
However, she pulled it off and was quickly offered a record deal. “There was this honeymoon period for six months, being wined and dined, then they offered me this contract, which I naively signed, but it turned out to be a total slave deal,” Stas reflects. “They owned my masters and publishing and gave me a monthly retainer that didn’t even cover basic living expenses.” Eventually, the label persuaded Stas to drop out of college and to take her music career seriously. “So I moved back in with my parents and spent the next year juggling three jobs to pay the bills and going to studio sessions most nights until four in the morning, whilst the label tried to shop my songs around.”
The breaking point came when she realised that the label was no longer willing to financially support her unless she turned herself into a “bubblegum pop star”, at odds with her vocal complexity, which has been compared to Nina Simone and Janis Joplin. “I reached breaking point, and was like, ‘I’m going back to school’”, Stas recalls, “and then they told me my contract meant that I couldn’t legally release any music without them for seven years”.
So it wasn’t until 2019, after finally completing her degree, that Stas was finally able to independently release her debut EP, Sacred Bull, a neo-soul project which richly captured her fervent, mahogany vocals. “I wasn’t going to just let go of music, it’s the reason I get up in the morning,” Stas says. “My voice is connected to my spirit, I’m a soul singer, so I’m yelling into the ether most of the time and you know the ether isn’t always so kind.” Sacred Bull caught the ear of an old family friend, Lenny Kravitz and led to “a real unicorn moment” of supporting him on tour.
Stas has been tentatively releasing singles since and building up a community of listeners and supporters. After her upcoming EP, titled Revival, Stas is aiming to slow things down. “Nowadays, a record is worth nothing,” Stas says, “because once you put it out people are like, cool, what’s next? And it’s like ‘I’ve just poured all of my energy and resources into this song, can you just sit with it for a bit?’” One way Stas has sought to steady the pulse of consumption is by creating a mailing list, which sends out timely links to interactive mood boards of her songwriting process: pulled imagery, personal iPhone shots, poetry and visual musings. It’s a delightful digital meandering akin to turning over a tapestry and seeing how all of the loose threads are connected.
It’s rather fitting then that Stas is currently working on an album entitled Tether, which centres around losing and gaining friendships. Having picked up film photography during lockdown, she is creating a series of portraits of different people who answered her Instagram call out for an exhibition to coincide with the album launch. The process will also involve Stas making her own paper from scratch, and sewing frames around the individual images, which are then interconnected together with red stitching. “We are all individuals, but every single person is connected in so many millions of ways,” Stas explains of the concept, “to so many millions of people, who help frame who we are.”
As our Zoom call winds down, I notice a small cream ceramic in the corner of Stas’s frame. “Oh these are my ceramics, my mediation,” Stas says, holding one up to the camera that is decorated with speckles and silhouettes. “I call them warm bodies because they are reminiscent of different body types, and you can put candles in them, so they just need to be used and kept warm because they can give you light.” Later on, I light one of my own candles and watch the small flame illuminate the whole room. Maybe that is a bit like what freedom is – finding and striking the right spark, a flickering light, in an otherwise dark and empty space.
Credits
Photography Dan Martensen
Fashion Alastair McKimm
Styling Annahstasia Enuke
Braid artist TreNae Bynum
Make-up Emi Kaneko at Bryant Artists using Kosas
Nail technician Roseann Singleton at Art-Dept using Chanel Le Vernis
Photography assistance Matchull Summers and Anthony Conklin
Fashion assistance Madison Matusich
Make-up assistance Wakana Ichikawa
On set production Mary Goughnour
Special thanks BIG and partners
All clothing and shoes DKNY
Jewellery (worn throughout) model’s own