Some releases arrive at the beginning of an artist’s life in music, while others carry the weight of everything that happened before the artist finally returned to it. And on her eagerly awaited new EP ‘Cold + Blue’, vocalist, songwriter and composer Anya Mia draws upon decades of listening, performing, writing and observing to create a four-track EP that feels like a confident gathering of long-held ideas.
Since returning to live performance, first through local appearances and self-produced shows and later through songwriter circles and open-mic events, she has gradually rebuilt a musical life on her own terms. And ‘Cold + Blue’ reflects that accumulated perspective. Its four songs move between vintage balladry, R&B-inflected songwriting, existential reflection and neoclassical folk without forcing those influences into one narrow identity.
The title-track opens the EP in a world of piano, strings and emotional frost. ‘Cold + Blue’ draws upon the elegance of mid-century pop ballads, using a deliberately retro arrangement to frame a relationship defined by cruelty and emotional distance. The classicism of the setting gives the song a sense of poise, but that refinement refuses to soften the hurt at its centre.
Then ‘Corporate Jive’ shifts the release into a more rhythmic and socially observant space. Drawing from older R&B and funk traditions, the track turns its attention towards professional ambition, repetition and the exhaustion of the modern working cycle.
The R&B influence provides warmth and motion, preventing the social commentary from becoming overly heavy. There’s also a useful tension between the groove and the subject matter, mirroring the way people are expected to keep moving even when the work itself becomes emotionally numbing.
While on ‘Time, Is It Our Enemy?’, the EP turns inward again. Framed as an existential love song, it considers how intimacy is shaped by passing years, missed opportunities and the awareness that every relationship exists within limits.
The title’s punctuation gives the question a slightly conversational hesitation, as though the speaker is discovering the thought while asking it. Here, time can erode, separate and change people, but it also allows understanding to develop, as the song appears to live inside that ambiguity.
The closing track ‘Lost in the Water’ introduces yet another tonal shift. Co-written with Louis Kirstein, who also contributes acoustic guitar, the song moves towards alt-folk and neoclassical textures. Its imagery of disappearance and lost love gives the EP its most elemental setting.
As a closing piece, it leaves the EP in a state of unresolved contemplation, and that choice feels especially appropriate. ‘Cold + Blue’s songs examine cruelty, work, time and loss from different angles, allowing contradiction to remain part of the experience.
It ultimately presents an artist who has no reason to restrict herself to one genre or era. Anya Mia has lived with these influences for too long to separate them neatly. Instead, she allows them to meet naturally, creating a project shaped by both formal training and personal experience.
Elegant, reflective and quietly assured, the EP captures the value of returning to creativity with more history behind you. Anya Mia may have taken the long road back to music, but ‘Cold + Blue’ suggests that every diversion has contributed something worthwhile to the journey.