Album Review: You’re Free to Go by Anjimile
On his third album, Anjimile splits open between devotion and disownment. He trades The King’s fury for something harder to fake: the courage to mean it when he says I love you.
Most love songs on You’re Free to Go sound like they were written with one foot already out the door. Anjimile Chithambo means them desperately, but he keeps stopping mid-declaration to ask whether the other person wants what he’s offering. On the title track, he builds shelter for someone and then wonders aloud if that’s enough. On “The Store,” he swears to God his life is in someone’s hands, promises anything they want, anywhere they want, and the biggest swing is the line “everything must go, so I just let go.” That kind of total surrender should scan as reckless. Coming from a songwriter whose last album, 2023’s The King, spent nearly every minute clenched with grief and fury over his estrangement from his mother after coming out as trans. “I prayed for rain all year,” he sings on “Rust & Wire,” and now someone is telling him the rain is here. Instead of celebrating, he wants to be kissed by the rust and wire, holy as a gospel choir, and lets that image hang—desire and devotion tangled up in something that could cut him.
The body keeps showing up on this record, and not as metaphor. Anjimile has been on hormonal therapy, and his voice has dropped, grown warmer and more muscular. The change is plain. “Waits for Me” does something braver. It moves between “when I was a little girl, I wanted to be free” and “when I was a little boy, I wanted to be real,” and those two lines coexist, separated by years and by everything that happened in between—the mother who wanted him to be one thing, the body that wanted him to feel another. He fell in love, he says, and almost didn’t hear the call. Transition here is memory, not announcement—something that happened gradually across a life and keeps happening, even now. “Rust & Wire” picks this up differently: “Your body, it changed me now,” he lets slip, and the line belongs to both lover and self, physical fact and spiritual concession in the same breath. He can’t separate who he’s becoming from who he’s becoming it with.
“Ready or Not” opens with a line that doesn’t need a second listen: “You made your choice, I’m not your kid/So I blocked your number, so what if I did?” He is talking to his mother, or to the space she used to fill, and nothing here dresses that up with ambiguity or softens it with context. Someone broke his voice with two heavy hands, and there will be blood, like you wanted. He waits too long, makes no time for his song, thinks he’s got it all wrong—and still tells whoever he’s addressing that they should pray to God. “Point of View” goes further in less time: one minute and twenty-one seconds, almost all of it spent repeating “you fucked up everything” after the quiet devastation of “I led you to water, but I won’t drink for you/I’m not your mother.” There’s no plea for understanding, no softening. And “Enough,” the closer, twists the knife once more: “Our blood is water/I’m not your daughter.” The last time was the last time. Do you love me? Do you want me bad enough?
“I don’t wanna be a son of a bitch to you,” Anjimile sings on “Exquisite Skeleton,” taking off his dress, shaking off his skin, trying to say the thing one more time for the person who won’t hear it. “My life is in your limb.” Six times he asks them not to turn their back on him. He can’t forget his flesh, oh how he’s tried, and the blush of a human mess is settling. It could be a plea to a parent or a confession to a lover, and it never decides. “Afarin,” a few tracks later, comes from the other direction. His heart is already broken, he has nothing to lose, and he offers himself to someone who could be anyone—“Am I just one of the others waiting in line, biding my time?” The section introduces the Farsi word for praise, for bravo, and turns the whole thing into a kind of benediction: tasting the water run clear, the shadow full of light. “Exquisite Skeleton” begs, but “Afarin” lets go. Foolish and holy might be identical here.
Being that it’s album number three, You’re Free to Go is Anjimile’s best record, as it has his best songs and because nothing here repeats another cut’s moves. The love tracks carry real stakes, never shading into vague gratitude, and the estrangement tracks hit with a plainness that makes them harder to shake. “Destroying You,” where Sam Beam joins him, gets at something the rest of the record only grazes. “Free me, leave me/I am no one/I am no thing,” Anjimile pleads, and then turns it outward: does everybody want to believe? A couple of the gentler cuts are pleasant without adding much to the conversation that the fiercer material is having. But a record that contains a record like “Exquisite Skeleton” doesn’t need every song to draw blood. It’s already left a mark.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Rust & Wire,” “Exquisite Skeleton,” “Ready or Not”