By John Parker
“Devotion,” the latest single from Ananda Xenia Shakti and Love Power the Band, begins with a paradox. Its subject is surrender, but the singer behind it has spent a lifetime pursuing freedom.
For Ananda Xenia Shakti, those impulses are apparently inseparable. Long before meditation, yoga and sacred music became central to her life, she was Xenia Holliday of the B-Girls, the all-female band that emerged from the late-1970s punk scene. She toured with the Clash during its London Calling era and sang backing vocals on Blondie’s AutoAmerican. Punk offered one route out of conformity. Decades later, “Devotion” proposes another: quieting the mind until something beyond it can be heard.
The song emerged during a silent meditation retreat in Andhra Pradesh, India. Ananda was ill and awake during the night, unable to continue the meditation she had intended to practice. She began singing instead, softly invoking Radha and Krishna. A melody gradually formed around the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra.
“Devotion” retains the circularity of that experience. Rather than behaving like a pop song that keeps introducing new information, it makes repetition productive. Phrases return; melodic gestures hover; the arrangement advances almost imperceptibly. The music seeks immersion rather than suspense.
That could easily turn static. It doesn’t.
Love Power the Band creates movement through changes in density and emphasis rather than abrupt transitions. The accompaniment surrounds the vocal instead of pushing it forward. Atmospheric sounds supply breadth; rhythmic elements establish a pulse without turning the mantra into a beat-driven crossover exercise. The production is polished, but it doesn’t scrub away the sense of intimacy.
At the center is Ananda’s voice, which carries considerably more history than the tranquil setting initially reveals.
She doesn’t sing “Devotion” as a virtuoso showcase. Her delivery is closer to invocation: sustained, unhurried and intent on the emotional meaning of repetition. Where mainstream pop vocals often treat each returning chorus as an invitation to become bigger, Ananda moves in another direction. Repetition becomes concentration.
That makes the track’s serenity feel earned rather than ornamental.
The difference matters because spiritual imagery has become thoroughly absorbed into contemporary consumer culture. Meditation, mindfulness and “wellness” can be marketed as readily as sneakers. “Devotion,” however, originates in an experience that was decidedly inconvenient. Ananda wasn’t luxuriating in an idyllic retreat fantasy when the song arrived. She was physically uncomfortable.
The contrast became the song’s underlying proposition: contraction and expansion can occur simultaneously.
There’s nothing particularly new about finding transcendence through suffering; religious and musical traditions have been exploring that possibility for millennia. But “Devotion” personalizes the idea rather than trying to monumentalize it. The song doesn’t need to persuade listeners that Ananda’s interpretation of her experience is objectively true. It only needs to make the transformation audible.
And it does.
The most intriguing context, inevitably, is her punk past. The B-Girls and “Devotion” occupy radically different sonic worlds, yet the distance between them can be exaggerated. Punk’s rebellion wasn’t only about distortion, speed or torn clothing. At its most purposeful, it was permission: permission to reject received expectations and invent another way of being.
“Devotion” applies that principle inward.
Instead of resisting record companies, social conventions or musical orthodoxy, it resists the assumption that consciousness must remain permanently occupied, that every silence requires filling and every discomfort requires immediate escape.
For a musician who once witnessed the Clash turn political conviction into physical performance, surrender becomes an unexpectedly defiant gesture.
There is also something refreshingly unfashionable about the song’s patience. Streaming platforms reward immediacy; songs increasingly announce their hooks before listeners can contemplate skipping them. “Devotion” refuses that anxiety. It doesn’t behave as though the listener might disappear at any second.
It assumes attention.
That makes the recording simultaneously more demanding and more generous. A casual listen can register it as pleasant, atmospheric devotional music. A closer one reveals its subtle architecture: the way repetition alters perception, the way the vocal shifts the emotional temperature without theatrics, the way spacious production makes absence part of the arrangement.
Its boundaries are equally clear. Anyone demanding dramatic rhythmic upheaval or conventional pop catharsis may find “Devotion” too committed to its meditative state. The song chooses continuity over surprise.
But breaking that spell would defeat its purpose.
Ananda Xenia Shakti has traveled an improbable distance from punk clubs to Indian meditation retreats, yet “Devotion” suggests that she has been asking essentially the same question throughout her career: What happens when the structures telling us who to be are stripped away?
Once, the answer arrived through amplification.
Here, it emerges from repetition, breath and silence.
“Devotion” doesn’t ask the listener to believe. It asks the listener to listen long enough for stillness to become an event.
