This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.Annahstasia on the Pressure Musicians Face to Go Viral on TikTok

Erica Gonzales, Photographed by Cameron McCool. Styled by Alex White.Tue, April 7, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC

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Annahstasia Is as Real as It GetsCameron McCool

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Annahstasia is in no rush. Maybe that’s obvious in how her deep, breathy voice floats through space, seeming to catch the air and land on gentle guitar strums rather than pulsing pop beats. Her approach to the music business is like that, too. In an era when artists are pressured to chase viral hits, post on social media, and constantly drop new singles, the L.A.-based singer-songwriter follows her artistic intuitions.

When she finally dropped her debut album, Tether, last June, it landed on many best new album lists, but the road there was not easy. Some songs on the album are over nine years old, and the LP itself was recorded three times over the years.

Born Annahstasia Enuke, she discovered her love of music through her uncle, a rock singer-songwriter, and her parents, who played songs from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s as she grew up in Los Angeles. She was signed to a label—and then shelved—as a teen, and says the experience left her fiercely devoted to her art today. If she can’t protect it, no one else will. True to form, instead of following up Tether with an entirely new album, in March she released Live at the Glasshaus, an anthology of live recordings with warm, free-flowing arrangements of her existing songs. Making music, she says, isn’t about ego. “I learned this from my parents. To be an artist is to be in service of the present and to be in service of the world.”

Was there a moment when someone told you that you had a unique voice?

I started singing because of racism and stereotypes. I was the only Black kid at my school when I transferred to this private institution.

I’m half Nigerian; my mom is white. My experience of the diaspora is on a different side of the spectrum, but these kids had never seen a Black person, let alone understood the word diaspora. Their approach to me as a person was to just layer on all these stereotypes. A lot of them were bullying me, teasing me, like, “Oh, do you eat fried chicken? Do you rap? Can you shake your ass?” And I’m like, “What are you guys on?” There was this joke that they thought I could sing, so they would say, “Sing a song for me, jukebox,” and taunt me about it. I would ignore them, but go home and be like, “I wonder if I can sing? I’ve never really tried.”

I remember trying to learn a Whitney Houston song. It was a little bit out of range for me, too high, even at that age. So I learned an Amy Winehouse song, and my dad came into the living room and was like, “Hey, you’re not that bad.” Someone convinced me to do the school talent show that year, so I did. I found that I really had no fear of the stage. I was a very shy and introverted person, but for some reason being onstage by myself didn’t feel scary at all. So I went up there and I sang “Valerie,” and everybody was a bit shocked because I don’t think they expected that (1) I could actually sing, and (2) that would be the voice coming out of me.

Bralette, Versace. Ring, bracelet, Cartier.Cameron McCool -

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When Tether finally came out last June, it was very well received critically. How did that feel?

It feels beautiful to be validated in your patience and also in your process, especially in a music landscape where everyone’s telling you to rush and go faster and take shortcuts—literally everyone. So much so that people don’t even realize that they’re taking shortcuts anymore. It’s just become the standard of how people make music nowadays: Feed the machine, feed the algorithm. I insisted I needed to do it my way and was often called a contrarian or a rebel, and not in a good way. It was like, “Why are you being so difficult?” I had a very clear vision of what I needed. I could not make this record clinically in a studio with no windows, hunkered down. It had to breathe. So for me to put it out, and for people to feel that humanness and to feel that love and to write about it so beautifully, makes me feel like I, as an artist, can trust my process even more.

Did you struggle with the threat of losing yourself during your earlier experiences in the music industry?

In a way. They said, “Oh, we can make you a star.” But they didn’t tell me all of the fine print. And the fine print was, “We will make you a star if you do everything that we tell you and you have absolutely no opinions of your own, but somehow are also original and yourself and unlike anybody else.” It was the most confounding situation. I started doing what I thought they had enlisted me to do, which was to be myself and to discover my talents and find what I like to write about.

As I was discovering myself and what I would and wouldn’t do, and what I would and wouldn’t talk about, and why I wouldn’t talk about certain things, or why I wouldn’t propagate certain stereotypes, I found resistance from the label, from the A&Rs. That just got more and more intense. I’m the type of person who, if you try to tell me to do something that I don’t want to do, it’s a hard no.

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When I reached that hard no, which was at around 19, I got shelved. I didn’t know what that was, and I found out the hard way. Basically, you are still under contract, but the label refuses to give you any funding and also refuses to put any of your music out. You cannot get out of the contract because you can’t fulfill the terms without releasing music.

I ended up trapped in that stage for a long time, but during that time I went to school, I finished my degree, and I learned more about the music industry. I became very well-educated about the system that I was navigating. It’s a very disheartening and depressing system; that is just a fact. It’s not set up for artists, but at least I learned those lessons young. Nobody’s puppeteering me, and nobody can.

Dress, Gabriela Hearst. Earrings, necklace, bracelets, Cartier.Cameron McCool 2025How do you navigate those industry pressures now? Is anyone telling you to be on TikTok? How do you respond to that?

I mostly ignore them. It’s not a perspective of, I don’t want to play the game. It’s more like an equation of, What is worth my time? All of that posting is a time requirement, a time suck. [Labels] have put artists in the position of becoming content creators. Content creation is an entire other job, which requires writing, filming, editing, posting, and responding to all of the comments. The expectation that artists are somehow supposed to fit 48 hours into 24 hours by producing music from scratch, and then, on top of that, creating all of this content, is an equation that doesn’t make sense.

What was the decision behind your next release being a live album?

I wanted people to witness the way that the music shifts and changes outside of time and grows in a live environment. I was deeply inspired by live albums from Donny Hathaway, Bill Withers, Roberta Flack, Joni Mitchell, Dusty Springfield, and Nina Simone. Live albums have this freedom and a presence that is hard to convey in a studio album, because you’re not interacting with the audience. There’s an immediacy and a life imbued in it.

Are there any artists you’d love to collaborate with?

I’m still waiting for Björk to call. I would love to sing a song with Beverly Glenn-Copeland, and I see Labi Siffre’s back on the touring rotation, so I would hope to sing a song with him. He’s one of my big inspirations.

Lead image: Dress, Gabriela Hearst. Earrings, necklace, bracelets, Cartier.

Hair by Teddy Charles at Nevermind; makeup by Lilly Keys at A-Frame Agency; manicure by Raphael Park Charles; produced by Hyperion.

A version of this story appears in the April 2026 issue of ELLE.

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