On her return as Austel, Devon-born, London-based artist Annie Rew Shaw treads a different path from the one that saw her receive widespread plaudits for the delicate, luscious piano songs of her 2024 debut album Dead Sea.

Following years as a session musician – performing at festivals such as Glastonbury and touring the UK – Austel’s 2018 debut EP earned praise from BBC 6 Music and The Line of Best Fit, with her 2020 follow-up Cold Love gaining further support from Fresh on the Net, O2 Music and BBC Introducing. In 2024, she released her debut album Dead Sea, a dreamy exploration of loss, recovery and transformation - self-produced and featuring collaborations with Grammy Award-winning engineer Guy Massey. 

Now exploring the folkier intimacies of the guitar for music that’s also in conversation with the field recordings of Jon Hopkins & King Creosote, Adrianne Lenker and Cassandra Jenkins, Austel is developing a very personal sound that she still manages to make feel spacious and open. 

The first track of this new material, The Beach in December, is a gently arresting song that recalls in its smaller details the steps towards acceptance after the premature end of a budding relationship, but on a broader scale draws from a revelatory ayahuasca ceremony that “reignited a lot of childhood memories that I’d completely forgotten” and the idea of mapping out a life from those small fragments of experiences we often disregard.

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