Anna Calvi, Hunter album review: A powerful statement from a liberated artist

Some artists pour their whole hearts out on a debut album and spend the rest of their careers trying to recapture that intensity. Others must learn to let rip.

Classically trained 37-year-old guitar virtuoso Anna Calvi is in the latter camp. Though both the Londoner’s eponymous 2011 debut and its 2013 successor One Breath were nominated for the Mercury Prize, she was constrained by her exquisite taste. Her love of melodrama came filtered through knowing noir, with classy nods to heroes David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Julee Cruise, Ennio Morricone and Edith Piaf.

Listening to her on headphones, you could pretend to be a character in a David Lynch movie. But the pounding drums, pulsing bass and gut-wrenching vocals of her third album Hunter will make you walk like a taller, bolder, sexier version of yourself, because she has bloomed into a wilder, freer and more direct version of herself.

This was a conscious move for the shy daughter of two psychotherapists. Rebuilding her identity after breaking up with her girlfriend of eight years, she became sick – in her words – of “seeing women depicted as being hunted by men in our culture” and began writing lyrics as an “Alpha” determined to go out into the world and “explore pleasure in all possible ways, free from any shame”.

With a voice she’s finally trusting herself to use with the same confidence that she’s always had in her guitar, Calvi lays yowling, prowling animal claim to both the male and female aspects of herself. She opens the album with a predatory strut of a strum, asking: “If I were a man in all but my body/ Oh would I now understand you completely?”

As the big drums wallop on in, producer Nick Lauer (best known for his work with Nick Cave) allows Calvi’s sinuous melodies to slide through each other like snakes. There’s wit too, in the sweet, breezy phrase Calvi breathes over the darker sound: an echo of Kraftwerk’s Computer Love. Gender online, hey?

Elsewhere, Calvi delivers a thunderous, uncompromising battle cry on “Don’t Beat the Boy Out of My Girl” and ripples moonlight through the strings of her guitar to the slow, cinematic romance of “Swimming Pool”.

There is, of course, a fine line between sounding serpentine and plain meandering and Calvi isn’t consistently on the right side it. Some guitar solos, as on “Wish” and the otherwise thrilling “Alpha”, wang on a bit. But, overall, this is a powerful statement from a laudably liberated artist. A record red in tooth and claw.