Written by In the eight years since her third studio album, Hunter, Anna Calvi has scored the hit TV series Peaky Blinders, featured on a record by Jeff Goldblum, and revisited her Hunter demos on a subsequent EP, Hunted. Calvi also became a mother, which is the monumental life change that inspired Is This All There Is?, her new EP.
Parenthood and the shifts that it entails are a powerful source of inspiration. But the record, for all its considerable charm, feels more in tune with the slightly haphazard run of guest appearances, soundtracks, and tinkering that followed Hunter than with that sharply focused album. The EP’s four tracks include two covers and two original songs—one written for Joanna Hogg’s 2021 film The Souvenir Part II—and feature four guests who don’t have a great deal in common.
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Rather than a coherent statement, Is This All There Is? shows the best and also the most forgettable sides of Calvi, an artist known for operatic indie rock, steel-guitar twang, and impassioned vocal acrobatics. “God’s Lonely Man,” with Iggy Pop, is a fabulously stomping glam rock swinger, like Iggy’s “The Passenger” at a particularly decadent bachelorette party or Calvi’s “Desire” on 1970s Top of the Pops. Both artists sounds diabolically rakish, their voices circling and lurching like unchained tigers as they push each other to crazed new heights—see, in particular, Calvi’s berserk backing vocals toward the end of the song, where she wails like a vengeful banshee.
By contrast, the cover of Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love,” with the estimable Laurie Anderson, feels muted and misjudged. Calvi and Anderson’s version of the song ditches almost all that is great about the Kraftwerk original—melody, production, spirit—and instead takes its inspiration from the song’s rather sparse lyrics. These were prophetic in 1981, when the song was released on Kraftwerk’s Computer World, but here sound stripped of any life by Anderson’s unmistakable voice and overly serious intonation, which only serve to underline the fact that, in 2026, it’s not really a revelation that lonely people seek connection via electronic devices. The fact that “Computer Love” doesn’t have many lyrics to begin with means that Anderson has to go all in on her theatrical interpretation, putting different nuance into every repeated line in a way that sounds a little silly, despite Calvi’s admirably intense wall of operatic backing vocals.
The record’s other cover, on which Calvi and Perfume Genius take on Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “I See a Darkness” in industrial-ambient fashion, is better: The interplay between Calvi’s forceful contralto and Perfume Genius’ fragile falsetto lends unsettling intrigue, like Depeche Mode in a haunted house. Ultimately, though, their version feels a little bloodless; it’s unlikely to dislodge either the original song or Johnny Cash’s desperate cover in anyone’s affections.
The EP’s final song, “Is This All There Is?”, is an update of Calvi’s “Drive,” from The Souvenir Part II soundtrack, with the addition of the National’s Matt Berninger as a duet partner. Calvi said she was trying to imagine herself as “a female Iggy Pop” when writing the song and, as lovely as “Is This All There Is?” is—a rolling torch song with guitars that resonate like a desolate arctic howl—the resemblance to “God’s Lonely Man,” in both rhythm and vocal interplay, reminds us that this song would have been a thousand times better with Iggy himself on vocals.
Is This All There Is? is billed as the first of a trilogy of records “which explore identity as a metamorphosis, shaped and reshaped through the experience of falling in love.” And it is possible that these four songs will make perfect sense as a unit when Calvi unleashes the rest of the trilogy. As things stand, though, the record feels a bit undercooked, like a ’90s CD single with three bonus tracks that are only really there to support the A-side. Where Anna Calvi, One Breath, and Hunter are all strong thematic works that transcend their individual songs, Is This All There Is? feels more like an afterthought than the comeback of steel and thunder you’d expect from an artist as fiercely assured as Calvi.
