Little Annie doesn’t enter a room. She materializes - slowly, like smoke curling in through a cracked window. On "With", a new collection of collaborations spanning her shape-shifting, slow-burning, cigarette-paper career, Annie curates a dark, glistening bouquet of duets with some of alternative music’s most infamous spirits: Marc Almond, Coil, Swans, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Kid Congo Powers, Baby Dee, Paul Wallfisch, and Italian cultists Larsen. The result is not so much a compilation as a séance.

Anne Bandez - aka Little Annie, aka Annie Anxiety - is the kind of artist whose career reads like a novel no one was brave enough to write. Emerging from the scorched poetry of New York’s No Wave scene in the late ’70s and somehow managing to flirt with industrial, torch song, trip-hop, punk theater, and glam decadence all in the same breath, she’s one of those rare voices that sounds both completely disenchanted and madly in love with the world. And now here she is, with all her ghosts in tow.

The album begins with a fragile swoon: “Yesterday When I Was Young” with Marc Almond. If this isn’t two cabaret vampires sipping absinthe and weeping gently over the last cigarette in Paris, I don’t know what is. Almond’s silk and Annie’s gravel create a kind of dignified decay. Romance, in ruins. The song becomes a perfume bottle of regret you want to wear anyway.

Then comes “Things Happen” with Coil, and suddenly we’re floating in an esoteric ether - Annie whispering over liquid electronics like she’s telling secrets to an obsidian mirror. You can practically hear John Balance’s shadow nodding in approval. It’s not a duet, exactly - it’s more like being held aloft by an invisible choir of machines.

"With" isn’t just a list of names - it’s a network of moods. “The Weather The War” with Kid Congo is like a news broadcast from a dream. “Isle of Weeping Ladies” with Paul Wallfisch is the album’s monochrome heart, all ghost piano and dignity, and “State of Grace” with Baby Dee and Bonnie “Prince” Billy feels like a drunken gospel for the world’s forgotten saints. It is vulnerable, tender, and absolutely cracked in all the right ways.

And then there’s the collaboration with Swans - “Some Things We Do”. Yes, it is as stark and seismic as you'd expect. But the surprise is how Annie matches the towering, tectonic gravitas of Swans not by out-shouting them, but by going inside - deeper, quieter, like a prayer mouthed under the roar. She doesn’t ride the wave. She anchors it.

Sonically, the whole thing is gorgeously mastered by Martin Siewert, who knows a thing or two about sculpting shadow and feedback. You don’t just hear this record - you sit inside it. Preferably with velvet curtains drawn and a glass of something dark. The artwork - by Annie herself - adds another layer of her presence: smudgy, symbolic, and full of unsaid things.

What’s most striking about "With" is that it doesn't feel like a best-of or a look-what-I-did collection. It feels more like a scrapbook left behind in an old nightclub dressing room: pages of candlelit hymns, strange dreams, lipstick-smeared dedications to late-night souls and early-morning regrets. The glue is Annie herself, an artist who never shouts, but always haunts.

She doesn’t merely collaborate - she possesses and is possessed in return. Like a jazz singer in a haunted warehouse, she lets every track collapse into its own drama, leaning into melancholy like it’s a trusted old armchair.

You don’t need to know all the names involved here. But if you do, "With" feels like a reunion of kindred disobedients. If you don’t, then this might just be the most stylish introduction to the underworld you’ve ever had.

"With" is torch song, séance, lullaby, and warning. And Little Annie remains what she’s always been: too strange for stardom, too radiant for oblivion, and still singing, with or without your permission.