By: Sophie Calder
The former B-Girls punk turns a midnight revelation in India into a hypnotic collision of mantra, meditation and hard-won freedom.
There’s something wonderfully perverse about a veteran of late-’70s punk releasing a song called ‘Devotion’. Punk was supposed to tear down idols, reject authority and spit at convention. Devotion suggests surrender, reverence and giving yourself over to something larger. Yet for Ananda Xenia Shakti, these aren’t opposing impulses. On her latest single with Love Power the Band, they sound like stops along the same road.
‘Devotion’ doesn’t explode from the speakers. It materialises.
That distinction is crucial. The song emerged during a silent meditation retreat in Andhra Pradesh, India, after Ananda woke in the night suffering from physical discomfort. Sleep had disappeared, and conventional meditation wasn’t working, so she began singing the names of Radha and Krishna. Somewhere between illness, chanting, and the peculiar clarity of the small hours, a melody appeared around the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra.
Ananda has spoken about the song as something received rather than consciously composed. That can be dangerous territory for any musician: claims of divine inspiration don’t automatically make for divine records. Fortunately, ‘Devotion’ doesn’t depend upon its backstory to generate atmosphere.
The track moves slowly and confidently, building a world from repetition, space and texture. Love Power the Band resist the urge to smother the mantra beneath layers of mystical sonic furniture. Instead, the production gives Ananda room to inhabit the music.
Her vocal is the key. There’s no attempt at pyrotechnics. She sings with an almost private tenderness, allowing phrases to hover somewhere between melody and prayer. The effect is less Sunday-service grandiosity than the sensation of accidentally overhearing somebody singing to themselves because they need to.
That vulnerability gives ‘Devotion’ its power.
And vulnerability, strangely enough, brings us back to punk.
Before she became Ananda Xenia Shakti, yoga instructor, spiritual seeker and leader of Love Power the Band, she was Xenia Holliday of The B-Girls. Formed while she was still a teenager, the pioneering all-female outfit emerged from punk’s original cultural detonation. She toured with The Clash during the London Calling period and contributed backing vocals to Blondie’s Autoamerican.
Then, as greater recognition beckoned, she chose another life.
A spiritual awakening led Ananda away from the music-business trajectory seemingly laid out before her. Meditation and yoga followed, along with extensive periods in India and a radically different understanding of what creativity might be for.
It would be tempting to package this as a tidy conversion narrative: punk rebel finds spirituality, swaps chaos for serenity and lives happily ever after. ‘Devotion’ suggests something more interesting.
The rebellion never disappeared.
If punk was Ananda’s attempt to escape society’s expectations, her spiritual practice became an attempt to escape the expectations constructed inside the self. One challenges the establishment; the other challenges conditioning. Both begin with refusing to accept that the reality handed to you is the only one available.
‘Devotion’ consequently possesses more backbone than its serene surface initially suggests.
Its central paradox is embedded in the circumstances of its creation. Ananda’s body was in distress, yet she experienced an increasing sense of inner expansion. Rather than waiting for the discomfort to end before something meaningful could happen, she allowed the discomfort into the experience.
That’s a more compelling proposition than the usual wellness-era promise that enlightenment should make everything feel nice.
There’s mud underneath this lotus.
Musically, ‘Devotion’ occupies the increasingly porous territory between New Age, mantra music, ambient pop and global spiritual traditions. But listeners needn’t know their Radha from their Krishna to understand its emotional logic. The track works because its fundamental movement, from tension toward release, is universal.
Its deliberate pace may test anyone whose attention span has been pulverised by three-second video clips, but that’s almost the point. ‘Devotion’ refuses to behave like content. It asks to be experienced at the speed at which it was conceived.
That feels unexpectedly confrontational in 2026.
Everything about contemporary music consumption encourages skipping: the next song, the next recommendation, the next notification, the next artist appearing briefly before disappearing into the feed. Ananda and Love Power the Band instead ask listeners to remain inside a single emotional space.
Stay.
Listen.
Allow something to happen.
There’s no guarantee of enlightenment, obviously. But there is a compelling recording waiting there.
Ananda Xenia Shakti may be several decades removed from the clubs of her punk youth, but ‘Devotion’ proves she hasn’t lost the instinct to resist whatever culture tells her she’s supposed to do. She’s simply discovered a different weapon.
Once it was volume.
Now it’s silence.
