"Lessons For Mutants": Johanna Warren's new studio album

Enchanting sixth album from US musician and actor

American-Welsh transplant Johanna Warren’s sixth solo record is as masterful as it is enchanting. From the lo-fi lilt of “I’d Be Orange” to the wrought-up fervency of “Oaths” and the warm smoke of “Tooth For A Tooth”, Warren displays her stylistic fantail without the musical shifts ever seeming to jar. Begun in 2018, and carried across both the pandemic and the Atlantic, geography and time have allowed these tales of ambition and iconoclasm to deepen. Warren lands at “Involvulus”, a short, piano-led closer that draws on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It’s the most perfectly poised song you’ll hear all year.

In the early days of the pandemic, Johanna Warren was faced with a choice: up sticks from New York to Wales, to a place she had never been, to be with a person with whom she had spent all of two weeks. "Or move back in with my parents, and cry every day."

Lockdown in rural mid-Wales treated her well. "It was a revelation for me to be in one place," she says, "as someone who's just been blowing around in the wind for years." A qualified herbalist, she spent her days "wildcrafting and fermenting and making homemade alcoholic beverages and pickling and making tinctures and salves, just going full kitchen witch."

She also found time to finish her sixth studio album, the stunning Lessons For Mutants. Begun in New York, and completed in Ramsgate, its songs mark an unleashing in both sound and emotion for Warren. "A lot of my earlier work is so gentle and soft and pretty and kind of delicate," she says. "But I feel increasingly I'm connecting with cathartic expressions of rage. Looking back on my younger self, there was almost more of a performative need to be seen as angelic, and now I'm like, “Fuck it, I'm a demon too."