Beyond the ethereal Julee Cruise effect on Ana Roxanne’s latest album, Poem 1, there is a constant sense of sound flowing in a single direction within each song and throughout the album. It’s as if everything Ana Roxanne sings—or rather, everything that happens before, during, and after her voice—were a flowing river, a natural movement with its own rhythm, unstoppable. That sensation is present in the Ana Roxanne of 2026; the music continues, endures, beyond the end of the song, beyond the end of the album. It’s a sensation that transcends what you hear.
It feels—and sounds—eternal. The New Yorker had already made beautiful albums, but the Ana Roxanne found in these songs has achieved something difficult: creating sounds—sequences of sounds—that transcend the saturation of time, of the present. An album for eternity? It sounds like one. An album to heal all broken hearts? To settle all sorrows? Songs to agonize over the agony? Perhaps—it depends on where you listen, what you hear.
Poem 1 immortalizes itself, in constant contemplation; it listens to itself and, therefore, manifests this fluidity within itself, as if it were also somewhat incredulous that all of this is happening. Ana Roxanne, on the other hand, is serene, certain of her path, caught between a sadness for which there are no words and a desire for the pain to end without breaking that continuity. It seems contradictory, but it isn’t; these are the pains and incongruities of making an album about life, with life itself. Poem 1 breathes, and we breathe with it. Ana Roxanne will take care of us when she takes the stage.
AS