The Anchoress

Welsh songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer The Anchoress (aka Catherine Anne Davies) has found a room of her own, creating a one-woman sonic vision on her Welsh Music Prize nominated second album, The Art of Losing.

This is a collection of songs that Caitlin Moran hailed as “the inadvertent, beautiful, and truthful soundtrack to this moment” and Elton John called “one of my favourite records of the year”. The Sunday Times ended 2021 by naming it as one of their seven “must-hear” Albums of 2021, along with Record Collector, Line of Best Fit, the Mail on Sunday and Prog Magazine, who all crowned the album as one of their best albums of 2021.

Produced and written by Davies herself, The Art of Losing was created in the aftermath of several years of huge personal loss, after the untimely death of her father, undergoing treatment for cervical cancer, and navigating multiple counts of baby loss. But the resulting record tackles grief with a defiant optimism, firmly concerned with how to find purpose in the midst of loss: “Was there some purpose to losing my mind?”, she asks on the title track: “What did you learn when life was unkind?”