Anja Huwe

Anja Huwe is the singer of the legendary forerunners of the post-punk movement Xmal Deutschland. After Xmal Deutschland’s success with four albums on cult labels such as 4AD, Huwe abandoned music to pursue her visual art career. But leaving her legacy in the past was not so easy. During the pandemic Huwe reconsidered her decades-long hiatus from music. With a push from her longtime friend Mona Mur - a singer, song-writer and film music composer (as well, as the front woman of early -80s project Mona Mur & die Mieter) Huwe decided to join Mur in her studio in Berlin. Together with Manuela Rickers, guitarist and collaborator in Xmal Deutschland, they tossed around music and poetic ideas that would eventually become the album Codes. Xmal Deutschland were never complacent but consistently ravenous in their attack throughout the 1980s. Huwe’s return is no different. Unexpected but long overdue, Codes is that missing page from post-punk’s history books, the freshly splayed paint across the decades-old canvas—it is the product of the tireless will to survive on her own terms.