In 2013, Lotte Kestner impressed many when her cover of Beyonce’s “Halo” was featured on HBO’s The Young Pope. She has been making music outside of this newer pseudonym as Anna-Lynne Williams since 1997. That’s notably so as part of the indie rock outfit, Trespassers William, alongside other credits—including a feature on the Chemical Brothers’ Push the Button and collaborations with Courtney Marie Andrews, Damien Jurado, and others.
Kestner’s forthcoming LP, Lost Songs—her seventh—lives up to its name. It’s a collection mostly comprised of originals written over the last decade, featuring instrumental parts from Kevin Long, Chris J. Cunningham (Ravenna Woods), and Jurado, who also brings two co-writes to the album. Kestner engineered, produced, and mixed the album herself and describes the record as 13 self-contained poems.
One such tune is “Slip”, which Kestner pinpoints as one of the oldest songs featured on her latest. Its haunting music video was directed by Cunningham under the Dark Details moniker and features imagery verging between eerie and nostalgic. The arrangement follows suit, featuring warm, sparse instrumentation besides Kestner’s croon.
Kestner tells PopMatters, “‘ Slip’ is one of the oldest songs on the new album/collection. It started as a poem, and one day at the Wurlitzer, this melody came out. The song itself is a collection of a few of my fondest memories, and I think Chris did a beautiful job capturing that dreamy nostalgia of the song. A lot of the video was shot in slow motion, employs a lot of tricks, and then reveals those tricks to you throughout the video. There were just three of us there when the video was filmed, but I think we pulled off some engaging imagery.”
Lost Songs releases on 11 February via Saint-Loup, and it’s available for pre-order now.