A SPIRITUAL SPARK IN A PERFECTLY STILL ROOM – ANNAHSTASIA LIGHTS UP HOXTON HALL

LIVE REVIEW | ANNAHSTASIA w/ Qazi & Qazi | HOXTON HALL, LONDON | 27th November 2025 by Kevin O’Sullivan

There are some rooms in London that feel less like venues and more like portals, the kind of spaces where music isn’t just played but breathed into the walls. Hoxton Hall—one of the city’s last surviving Victorian music halls—has always been one of those places. Its wooden balconies and intimate, theatre-like hush make it an ideal setting for stripped-back performances, the sort where you can hear a pin drop, feel a lyric land, and sense the collective heartbeat of a crowd hanging on every note. On the 27th of November, at Annahstasia’s third London performance in a single week, the room became exactly that: a vessel for something reverent, emotional, and quietly transformative.

Qazi & Qazi

Before Annahstasia took the stage, the evening opened with Qazi & Qazi, the sister duo whose music feels like it’s woven from silk threads, fragile yet utterly captivating. The chemistry between them is less performance and more instinct—two voices shaped by the same history, the same breath, the same bloodline. Their songs unfurled like spells, the audience held in complete silence as they moved through harmonies that felt impossibly natural.

There’s an almost ritualistic quality to their presence. They joked lovingly about their fondness for saffron-flavoured water—apparently the secret to keeping Princess Naadirah, as one sister teasingly crowned the other, in proper royal form. It’s rare to watch a support act hold a crowd so respectfully and so completely; at Hoxton Hall, not a whisper rose during their set. “Mesmerising” is a word so overused that critics try to avoid it—but here it applies in its purest form. They mesmerised. Simple as that.

Their set flowed with a quiet beauty that perfectly set the tone for what was to come: an evening built on intimacy, sincerity, and a deep respect for the craft of songwriting.

Annahstasia

When Annahstasia stepped onstage, the audience erupted—not rowdy, but full of warmth, the kind of applause that lifts an artist before a single note is sung. And then, as quickly as it rose, the room returned to silence as she opened with a stripped-down, a cappella, relevant-for-our-time version of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s protest song, “We’ve Come a Long Way Together,” performed alongside the two sisters, Qazi and Qazi. Together, their voices filled the hall with a weight that felt both historical and immediate—an invocation, a reminder, and a grounding force. It set the tone not just for the set, but for the energy of the night: contemplative, soulful, and fiercely present.

Annahstasia has always carried a sense of purpose in her music—an unshakeable devotion to truth, craft, and self-interrogation. She spoke candidly about the album she made as a collection of songs themed around rebellion, a project rooted in her frustrations with the world. “Psychologists say that when you have bad moments, you should root yourself in gratitude,” she explained. “Look for peace. But I keep coming back to dissatisfaction.” There were no theatrics in the way she said it—just honesty, delivered with the ease of someone who has long accepted that discomfort is part of her creative engine.

At one point, after posing the question, “Whose imagination are we living in?” a voice cut through the silence—not a person, but a device: Siri chiming in to announce, “Sorry, Siri doesn’t have the answer!” The room erupted in laughter, Annahstasia doubling over before regaining composure. Moments like that—tiny, human, unplanned—made the night feel even more intimate.

The setlist was a beautifully curated journey through her repertoire: ‘Take Care of Me’, ‘Overflow’, ‘Silk and Velvet’, ‘Garden’, ‘Satisfy Me’, ‘Saturday, Sunday’, and ‘Believersong’, during which she noted, “The root of all folk music is four chords and the truth. Sometimes I only use two.” It wasn’t self-deprecation—it was a mission statement. Annahstasia’s strength lies not in complexity but in clarity, in stripping back everything until the message shines through.

She asked the crowd, “Who’s been a hypocrite?” before launching into “Silk and Velvet,” one of the night’s absolute high points. Her delivery was rich, textured, and full of emotional grit—tender one moment, fire-lit the next.

There was also a moment of vulnerability when she spoke about the realities of touring: “It’s hard, and it’s expensive. I don’t like money,” she admitted. “I just try to do good with it.” That led into “Unrest,” performed with a kind of luminous conviction that made the song feel reborn.

By the time she reached “Villain” near the end of the set, the room felt completely submerged in her world. The line “Take it back / all the anger and the fury” landed with particular power—delivered with the authority of someone who has lived every word she sings.

The audience, deeply respectful throughout, saved their energy for the spaces between songs. Every pause was met with a roar—people calling out compliments, declaring her sublime, clapping with the ferocity of a crowd twice the size. And yet during the songs themselves, you could truly hear a pin drop.

Though she played for approaching an hour and a half, time moved strangely—slipping past in what felt like minutes. That’s the magic of Annahstasia: her unique sound—somewhere between folk, soul, and something far older and deeper—is unlike anything else on the contemporary stage. Her voice doesn’t just carry melody; it carries memory, conviction, and a lived-in warmth that feels ancient and new all at once. Coupled with a presence that radiates calm strength and quiet command, she doesn’t perform at you; she draws you into a shared space where the world slows long enough for emotion to breathe.

In a week where she delivered three performances across London, this one felt like the crown jewel. A stunning venue, an audience that understood and honoured the moment, a support act that mesmerised, and an artist whose values—truth, rebellion, grace, dissatisfaction, hope—radiate through every note she sings.

A highlight gig of the year. A spiritual star in the making.