Beaks

Anna Francesca, aka Beaks, has none of those neatly polished pop-star origin stories. Her path leads from poetry to photography and modelling work – including for Céline, Vivienne Westwood, Miu Miu, and Chanel – as well as to studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, before arriving at her own music. What might seem like a detour now reveals itself as the real foundation. Because once you have learned to hide behind clothes, images, or texts, you also understand what it means to truly show yourself on stage: vulnerable, immediate, and without filters.

Anna Francesca’s songs emerge accordingly from conversation, closeness, and trust. She works almost exclusively with friends, feeling her way forward through shared jams, letting simple basslines speak where others would already be overproducing. This reduction is a stance – a minimalism that leaves room for lyrics that move between dry existentialism and the pulse of the present.

Tracks like »I Dropped The Bottle« and »Dirty Girls« combine laconic vocals with propulsive synth-pop and an indie edge, somewhere between The Kills and Caroline Polachek, yet never dissolving into mere reference points. It is music for daydreamers still carrying the aftereffects of the present in their bones.

As international as her outlook may be – her first performances already took her as far as Tokyo – Vienna remains her centre: a small, close-knit scene in which everyone works with everyone else. And yet Beaks is repeatedly drawn back to the narrow, dark clubs around the world, whose »cave situations« are her natural habitat.