Agnes Aleesy Returns with ‘La Columna’
Ōtautahi songwriter Agnes Aleesy’s latest offering La Columna is a song named after and partly inspired by Frida Kahlo’s The Broken Column. Inspired by experimental, genre-blurring artists like James Blake and Moses Sumney, it moves between bargaining and something close to faith, without settling on either.
At the centre of La Columna is the experience of arriving at hope without ever deciding to. It starts from a place of wishing things were different, and ends somewhere closer to accepting they might not change, and finding a way through anyway. For Aleesy, that shift only came after resisting the thing she needed most: acceptance. Later in the track, that resistance gives way to the idea that everyone carries a piece of the divine within them.
“I think hope is often in the surrender,” Aleesy says. “When you’re working hard to prove yourself, to deserve better, deserve freedom, you can’t be in a state of hope—you’re in a state of work and striving.”
“I keep coming back to this idea of alchemising. That’s why I play around, explore, try to make something new and beautiful out of something that was raw, vulnerable, maybe even ugly.”
The track opens as an intimate chamber-pop piece, led by acoustic guitar, strings, and Aleesy’s layered vocals. Percussion creeps in as the song builds, culminating in a piano-led breakdown that swells into an alt-R&B drum groove and bassline while Aleesy repeats the refrain, “It’ll all be over / Maybe we’ll make it through.”
The process of writing and recording La Columna was primarily a solo endeavour, with Aleesy (Alice Tanner) self-engineering the vocals, cello, piano, and acoustic guitar across countless rabbit holes and dead ends. Producer and friend Terence O’Connor (TEEKS, Troy Kingi, George Alice, Keenan Te) stepped in to shape the chaos, contributing bass, mixing, and mastering, alongside guest performances from Jonathan Tanner on violin and Cameron Finlay on drums.
“Alice is a visionary,” says Terence. “Each song is ornate and alive with layers of emotion and symbolism… My job was to help shape and guide these ideas into a finished record, adding and subtracting until we landed on the emotional core of each song. Alice and I share much of the same musical language so it felt almost telepathic”
La Columna is the first new music from Agnes Aleesy since 2023, and marks the lead single from a new collection due out in 2027 via Winegum Records.
