The Notebook Her Brother Gave Her

W.H. Auden’s last long poem is called The Age of Anxiety. It follows four strangers in a wartime New York bar, each searching for meaning in a world that keeps industrializing and accelerating away from anything that used to make sense. Hannah Rogers’s brother Luke gave her a notebook with that title on the cover, and she borrowed it for her debut album, which seems about right.

Rogers records as Pixx. She grew up in South London and attended the BRIT School in Croydon—the performing arts college that also produced Adele, Amy Winehouse, and King Krule, which is either a remarkable concentration of talent or evidence that a certain kind of South London restlessness needs somewhere to go. Her stated influences are Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Aphex Twin, a genuinely strange combination: confessional folk structure, lyrical economy, electronic texture. You can hear all three pulling at each other in her songs.

What Pixx actually sounds like is harder to summarize than those references suggest. Dream pop is the easiest shorthand—tempos that float rather than drive, melodies that take indirect routes, production that wraps everything in gauze. But there’s something more deliberate underneath. The songs have architecture. She’s not making background music; she’s making music that rewards attention while letting you pretend you’re not paying it.

The Age of Anxiety arrived at a moment when that title felt almost too timely—2017 being its own particular carnival of dread. Whether Rogers intended the resonance or just inherited it from Auden doesn’t really matter. The album sits in it comfortably. That’s harder to pull off than it looks.