By Tessa Marlowe
There’s a delicious contradiction at the center of Ananda Xenia Shakti’s career. Here is an artist whose earliest musical life unfolded in punk rock, a movement practically engineered around confrontation, who now makes music about surrender. Yet listen closely to “Devotion,” the latest single from Ananda Xenia Shakti and Love Power the Band, and the distance between those two ideas starts shrinking fast. Maybe surrender, done correctly, is its own form of rebellion.
“Devotion” certainly doesn’t behave like a contemporary single desperate to survive the algorithm. There’s no breathless sprint toward the hook, no conspicuous viral moment waiting to be extracted into 15 seconds of content. The track takes its time. It breathes. It circles. It asks you to enter its atmosphere rather than grabbing you by the collar.
That approach makes sense once you know where the song came from.
Ananda was attending a silent meditation retreat in Andhra Pradesh, India, when she woke during the night suffering from physical discomfort. Meditation wasn’t happening. Sleep wasn’t happening. So she began singing quietly, repeating the names of Radha and Krishna into the darkness.
Then the melody showed up.
Ananda describes “Devotion” less as something she wrote than something she received, with the song gradually forming around the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra. As her body remained uncomfortable, her inner experience moved in the opposite direction: toward peace, openness and an unexpected feeling of being held.
If that sounds dangerously close to the setup for some incense-scented New Age cliché, here’s the surprise: the recording doesn’t feel like one.
Love Power the Band gives “Devotion” enough atmosphere to establish its spiritual intent without drowning it in celestial wallpaper. The arrangement moves through ambient textures, devotional influences and subtle world-music elements, but its strongest instrument may be space. Sounds are allowed to linger rather than being stacked on top of one another.
And Ananda understands how to inhabit that space.
Her vocal isn’t designed to show you how well she can sing. It’s designed to communicate a feeling. There’s warmth, vulnerability and an almost conversational intimacy to her delivery. At moments, it feels less like listening to a conventional performance than overhearing someone halfway between singing and prayer.
Which brings us back to punk rock.
Before Ananda Xenia Shakti became a yoga instructor, spiritual seeker and leader of Love Power the Band, she was Xenia Holliday of The B-Girls, the all-female punk outfit that emerged from the combustible late-’70s scene. She toured with The Clash during the London Calling era, performed in the clubs where punk was being invented in real time and contributed backing vocals to Blondie’s AutoAmerican.
Then she walked away.
Not after everything collapsed. Not because nobody cared. She left as opportunities were expanding, after a spiritual awakening convinced her that the thing she’d been searching for through music and punk culture existed somewhere else.
That’s the detail that makes “Devotion” more interesting than its genre designation.
Ananda hasn’t spent the intervening decades attempting to recreate her youth. She followed the question that punk initially helped her ask: What happens when you stop accepting the identity you’ve been handed?
For her, the answer eventually involved yoga, meditation, extended periods in India and a concept of creativity that treats art as something received as much as manufactured. “Devotion” is essentially that philosophy compressed into a recording.
And strangely enough, it’s still punk.
Not sonically, obviously. Nobody is mistaking this for three chords hammered through a battered amplifier. But punk’s deeper proposition was always that the artist could reject the machinery telling her what she was supposed to be. Ananda did that twice: first by becoming a punk musician and later by abandoning the identity of punk musician when it no longer reflected who she was becoming.
“Devotion” carries that freedom quietly.
The song’s central idea, that contraction can contain expansion, isn’t presented as motivational merchandise. It comes directly from the circumstances of its creation. Ananda was physically miserable. Rather than waiting until she felt better to make something beautiful, the discomfort became part of the creative event.
That gives the track emotional weight beneath its tranquility.
It also makes “Devotion” unusually flexible. New Age and devotional audiences will immediately understand its vocabulary, but the song isn’t sealed inside those categories. Fans of ambient pop, meditative electronica, global music and experimental singer-songwriter work can find an entry point without signing up for anybody’s spiritual program.
That’s important because “Devotion” works best when it’s allowed to be an experience before it becomes an explanation.
Its most subversive quality might simply be its refusal to hurry.
Popular music in 2026 exists in a permanent state of “next”: next track, next clip, next notification, next microtrend. Ananda Xenia Shakti and Love Power the Band offer the opposite proposition. Stay here. Listen longer. Stop trying to control the moment.
For somebody who came of age in punk rock, that’s one hell of an evolution.
Or maybe it isn’t an evolution at all.
Maybe Ananda has been making music about freedom the entire time. She has simply discovered that sometimes the loudest way to say “no” to the world is to become completely still.
