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. Invited by her long-time friend Mona Mur, a musician, composer and producer, Huwe reconsidered her decades-long hiatus from music and decided to join Mur in her studio in Berlin. Together, they worked for a year and a half, composing, performing and producing the tracks from scratch, which would eventually become the album Codes. Integral to the overall sound experience was the input of Manuela Rickers who added her famed signature guitar style. 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.
