We’re living in an age where everybody wants enlightenment with next-day shipping. Download an app, light a scented candle, post a filtered sunset, and suddenly you’re a mystic. That’s why Devotion, the new single from Ananda Xenia Shakti and Love Power the Band, feels almost subversive. It isn’t selling spirituality. It sounds like someone accidentally stumbled into it and had the nerve to hit “record.”
The story behind the song almost reads like a cosmic practical joke. Silent meditation retreat in the mountains of Andhra Pradesh. Stomach rebellion in the middle of the night. No grand revelation on a mountaintop, no booming celestial voice. Just physical misery giving way to spontaneous chanting, and somewhere between discomfort and surrender, a melody emerges that refuses to let go.
Now that’s rock ‘n’ roll.
Not because there’s a Marshall stack or a guitar solo trying to peel paint off the walls, but because the greatest music has always come from collision—between certainty and chaos, flesh and spirit, ego and whatever comes after ego finally gets tired of talking.
The irony is delicious. Here’s a woman who once inhabited the fearless punk energy of The B-Girls, sharing stages with some of the loudest cultural revolutionaries of the late seventies, and decades later she’s making music that’s almost whisper-quiet. Yet the rebellious streak remains. Back then the rebellion was against conformity. Today it’s against distraction.
Musically, Devotion drifts somewhere between devotional chant, ambient meditation, world music, and dream-pop without becoming trapped by any of those labels. It refuses to perform for your attention. Instead, it patiently waits for you to stop fidgeting long enough to notice what’s already there.
That may be the bravest artistic decision anyone can make in 2026.
Ananda’s vocal doesn’t posture. It doesn’t oversell emotion or chase vocal acrobatics designed for social media clips. She sings like someone who’s forgotten an audience even exists, and paradoxically, that’s exactly what draws you closer. Every phrase feels less rehearsed than remembered, as though she’s rediscovering the melody while singing it.
Love Power the Band understands restraint better than many arena acts understand excess. The instrumentation never barges into the room demanding applause. It creates space—actual breathing room—for silence to become part of the arrangement. That’s increasingly rare. Modern production often fears empty space the way politicians fear honest questions.
What’s fascinating is how Devotion avoids becoming “new age wallpaper.” Plenty of spiritual music dissolves into harmless background ambience. This doesn’t. It has weight. Not because it’s loud, but because it’s earned. Every note carries the fingerprints of lived experience rather than manufactured serenity.
Maybe that’s what makes the song linger long after it’s over. It doesn’t insist that you’ll become enlightened. It simply suggests that somewhere beneath the endless notifications, opinions, headlines, and self-improvement slogans, there’s still a pulse worth listening to.
And perhaps the most punk thing Ananda Xenia Shakti has ever done wasn’t stepping onto a stage with The B-Girls decades ago.
Perhaps it was learning how to become completely still.
–Leslie Banks