Anna Ash writes songs of profound, startling, sensuous insight. Call it country, call it rock’n’roll, call it pulling off the road somewhere between Silver Lake and Bakersfield just to roll a cigarette, kick at the gravel, and brood. She’s Michigan born, currently Los Angeles based, and her music has been featured on the Showtime series Billions and Masters of Sex, as well as Freeform’s The Fosters and Epix’s docuseries Helter Skelter: An American Myth. In January of 2022 she released her fourth album, and first with Oklahoma indie-label Black Mesa Records. Sleeper is infused with an emotional intelligence that conjures nostalgia with the memory of a middle school boyfriend’s cologne and evokes a tenderness specific to L.A. in an evening full of car alarms, fireworks, and the rare California lilac. But she knows, too, that such knowledge will not spare her from heartache, from the weight of the past, from the wildfire drawing ever closer. Rueful, wise, sardonic, Sleeper plays like a Sally Rooney book if the novelist could palm-mute a Silvertone and launch her voice into cathartic falsettos.   The nine songs on her previous record L.A. Flame — mixed by Ryan Freeland, and released in September 2019 — are sparse and warm, tightly arranged and shrewdly observed. It’s a tumultuous record — mellow then volatile, withdrawn then confrontational, full of revelations, recriminations, revisions, and revivals. - Connor Towne O'Neill