There’s something quietly surreal about watching Anna Calvi and Iggy Pop sing together. Not in a “rock legend meets alt icon” way, but in the sense that they seem to exist on the same emotional frequency — two figures who have spent their careers turning internal states into performance, now sharing the same psychological space.
Their new collaboration, “God’s Lonely Man,” is the lead single from Calvi’s forthcoming EP Is This All There Is?, released March 20th. It’s a track built around tension rather than release: distorted guitars, stripped-back percussion, and a vocal exchange that feels less like a duet and more like a dialogue between different versions of the self.
Calvi has described Iggy Pop as “disruptive, raw, and honest”, and on “God’s Lonely Man” he becomes the embodiment of a destructive internal monologue — the voice that resists growth, intimacy, and transformation. When the two of them repeat the line “I wanna be somebody tonight”, it lands somewhere between desire and disassociation, like a mantra you’re not sure you believe.
The video, directed by Luigi Calabrese and Dominic Easter and shot in Miami, mirrors that ambiguity. There’s no narrative, no spectacle — just Calvi and Pop sharing a room. Sometimes they’re completely still, sometimes their energy feels volatile. The camera lingers on small gestures, glances, silences. It plays less like a music video and more like a screen test for an unmade film.
“God’s Lonely Man” sets the emotional tone for Is This All There Is?, a four-track EP that explores identity as something unstable and constantly shifting. It’s the first part of a planned trilogy, inspired by Calvi’s own perspective shift after becoming a parent. The record circles around existential questions: how do we reclaim intimacy in a hyper-digital world? What does it mean to feel present, or awake? How many versions of ourselves do we move through in a lifetime?
Those questions are carried through the EP’s other collaborations. Laurie Anderson appears on a reimagining of Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love”, where her iconic, almost disembodied voice transforms the track into a meditation on digital intimacy and emotional distance. Matt Berninger and Perfume Genius feature elsewhere, not as conventional guests but as voices inhabiting the same conceptual world.
There’s a cinematic quality to the whole project, shaped by Calvi’s recent work scoring Peaky Blinders and composing an opera with Robert Wilson. Rather than standalone songs, Is This All There Is? feels like a sequence of scenes — a short film about desire, identity, and the quiet violence of personal change.
Calvi has long been drawn to artists who sit slightly outside genre and expectation — David Byrne, Brian Eno, Marianne Faithfull, Charlotte Gainsbourg — and this EP continues that lineage. Her collaborators here all share a kind of emotional singularity: voices that feel instantly recognisable, slightly unplaceable, and deeply internal.
There’s something especially resonant about Iggy Pop’s presence in this context. An artist whose entire career has been built on extremity, survival, and reinvention, now cast as the voice of resistance — the part of the self that doesn’t want to evolve because evolution requires loss. On “God’s Lonely Man”, he isn’t a nostalgia figure or a symbol of rock history. He’s a psychological presence.
Is This All There Is? doesn’t offer answers. It sits inside the questions, letting them echo. It’s a project about metamorphosis, but not the glamorous kind — more the slow, uncertain kind that happens when your life changes and your old identity doesn’t quite fit anymore. Watching Calvi and Pop share the same space, it feels less like a collaboration and more like a mirror.
Anna Calvi announces new EP Is This All There Is? will be released on March 20th
The four-song EP features collaborations with Iggy Pop, Laurie Anderson, Matt Berninger and Perfume Genius
words Al Woods
