Cover versions have always been woven quietly through Soap & Skin's work, present on every album since 2012's Narrow without ever being immediately announced as such. Austrian singer and composer Anja Plaschg has described them simply as a way to escape from herself, as a disguise and a hiding place. Torso, released in November 2024 on Play It Again Sam, gathers those impulses into a full collection for the first time, born from an invitation by the Donau-Festival in 2022 to perform all the cover songs she had accumulated over the years and crystallized from that performance into a permanent, definitive statement. The twelve songs gathered here span an extraordinary range of sources: Sufjan Stevens' "Mystery of Love," David Bowie's "Girl Loves Me" and "The End," the Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes," Tom Waits' "Johnsburg, Illinois," Lana Del Rey's "Gods and Monsters," Desireless' "Voyage, Voyage" in what Plaschg calls a Lifetime Version, 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up," and the traditional Vanuatu lament "God Yu Tekem Laef Blong Mi" among them. In Plaschg's hands none of these songs sound like themselves and yet somehow sound truer than they ever have, each one pulled through her singular sensibility and remade into something that could only have come from her. The album was recorded in Vienna with an ensemble under her direction, a departure from Plaschg's usual method of assembling music alone at home from previously recorded samples. The result is Torso: an exhibition of what lies behind the masks of others, built by one of the most movingly distinctive voices in contemporary music.
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