London-based singer-songwriter Anna B Savage announces her debut album A Common Turn (City Slang) set to be released January 29th. Playing on the album title, Savage is also sharing the alluring new single “A Common Tern” and its brutally mesmerizing video directed by Anna B Savage and Jem Talbot. The album follows the success of her 2015 debut EP, which was praised by press internationally including NPR and The Guardian, and quickly caught the attention of Father John Misty and later Jenny Hval, both of whom took Savage under their wing and brought Savage out on tours.

Following the release of her recent singles, “Chelsea Hotel #3” and “Dead Pursuits”, “A Common Tern” is about Savage escaping toxicity, initially by getting away from a toxic relationship with her partner at the time and then the toxic relationship she had built with herself. The moment Savage decided she needed to change coincided with the sighting of the titular common tern while on a fishing trip with her ex.

Expanding on this further she said, “When I saw the terns, I was pretty amazed: they really did seem like they were just suspended, dangling on the bottom of a thread. Something about that seeming captivity, being on the end of an invisible line, then breaking free. They were at once familiar and yet so strange and weird. I don’t think I entirely grasped the relevance while I was writing it but now it seems very, very frickin obvious. I spent a year and a half after the tern incident trying to extricate myself from the relationship, bit by bit, section by section. It was fuckin hard work, and I did do a lot of apologising. For me, a common turn means the common moment where you decide you just don’t/ can’t love someone any more, and there’s nothing any of you can do about it.”