After years of being told to sing louder, Hamburg-based artist MUANH embraces the power of her own voice on ‘hush,’ a spellbinding six-track debut EP that makes intimacy and restraint the foundation of its sound. Beginning with the breathtaking “already know,” the record follows love from its intoxicating first moments through disappointment and self-doubt toward the hard-won freedom of trusting yourself.

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Stream: “already know” – MUANH

The first almost-I love you can feel like its own language: Wordless, charged, and already understood.

It lives in the glance you hold a second too long, in the safety of someone moving around the kitchen, in the almost unbearable sweetness of knowing before anything has been said. It’s the soft ache of wanting the moment to last exactly as it is – before a name, before a promise, before reality has the chance to change its shape.

MUANH’s “already know” lingers in that fragile beginning, when intimacy has arrived before definition and two people are living inside the feeling rather than naming it. The second single from her debut EP hush, arriving October 23, is achingly intimate and dream-lit – a soft, smoldering alternative reverie that turns early love into warmth, wonder, and suspended time.

We waited way too long
You think you can take your shirt off?
See, I‘d look you right in the eyes
But I’m still a bit shy

You need a shoulder to cry on
I need somebody close
We never said those words before
But we already know

Hamburg-based artist Anna Anh Petry has been making music as MUANH for four years now: Quiet, slow-burning songs that unfold gradually rather than demand attention, carried by intimate vocals, minimal textured production, and a deep pull toward mood, nuance, and emotional ambiguity. “As pretty and cliché as it sounds, I’ve always turned to music for comfort,” she tells Atwood Magazine. “The songs I make don’t try to solve anything. If they do anything at all, I hope they make people feel a little less alone inside whatever they’re feeling.” That impulse is everywhere in “already know,” a song that seems to lower its voice in order to draw us closer – all brooding guitar, featherlight percussion, and atmosphere you can sink into.

“I think it’s for people who sometimes get overwhelmed by how loud everything is,” MUANH says of her music. “I love a good pop melody, but I also need a song to create a world around me. Something you can sink into.”

That world opens gently here. Inspired by late ‘80s and early ‘90s romance, as well as recent visionaries like Mk.gee, Dijon, and The Marías, “already know” glows with a hushed, alternative R&B touch: Angular guitar flickers through the dark, soft percussion hovers like breath, and MUANH’s voice pours light into the room without ever breaking the spell. The song is dreamy and lush, but its tenderness feels raw – not polished into distance, but alive with the human shyness of wanting to be known. When she reaches the refrain, “Your heartbeat rushing through my bones,” the whole song seems to surrender: A moment of longing met, closeness felt in the body, two people quietly recognizing what neither has yet said aloud.

How long ’til we can let it show?
You know that I already know
Your heartbeat rushing through my bones
I know that you already know

“‘already know’ was written pretty retrospectively,” MUANH shares. “I remember feeling really safe at home around my partner who was cooking dinner or lunch (don’t exactly remember anymore). I found myself thinking back to the early stage of our relationship that I sometimes miss (don’t we all?), when you can already feel that something between two people is becoming deep and meaningful, even though a lot still remains unspoken. There’s already a sense of safety and familiarity there, so nothing really needs to be defined yet.”

“To me, the song sits somewhere between longing and fulfillment,” she adds. “There’s a strong yearning for the other person, but unlike a lot of my songs, that longing is actually being met. It’s probably one of the warmest songs I’ve written emotionally.”

That warmth makes “already know” stand apart within the world of hush.

MUANH’s debut EP traces unresolved feelings, relationships, letting go, and the slow return to self – a cycle of pouring love and care into someone else before eventually learning to offer some of that same kindness inward. Its lead single, “u wanna have it,” opened the door with softness, restraint, and a darker tension underneath; “already know” exists before the cracks, before the difficult realizations, before love has had to defend itself. “It’s actually the beginning of the journey,” MUANH explains. “It’s the feeling of ‘I love you’ before you’ve actually said it. Everything still feels possible and you’re living more in the feeling than in reality.”

You greet the morning like a friend,
I hide beneath the sheets
But the air I breathe is turning cold
When you’re not next to me

you need a shoulder to cry on
I need somebody close
we never said those words before
but we already know

“I wanted the song to feel warm and suspended in time, like it’s holding onto that moment for just a little longer,” she continues. “It’s the escape and procrastination of staying in possibility before reality catches up. Sometimes those early feelings are so beautiful that you don’t want to move forward because saying things out loud means risking that something could change.”

That suspended feeling carries into the song’s production, which began with a simple acoustic guitar loop and later transformed as MUANH built out the track’s strange, delicate sound-world. “I actually wrote most of the lyrics and melodies within around two hours while sitting on the couch with a simple acoustic guitar loop from Splice,” she says. “Later on, I started experimenting more inside my DAW and eventually asked the band to record additional parts.”

How long ‘til we can let it show?
You know that I already know
Your heartbeat rushing through my bones
I know that you already know

How long ‘til we can let it show?
You know that I already know
Your heartbeat rushing through my bones
I know that you already know

“One of my favorite details in the production is the intro guitar sample,” she adds. “It actually comes from an outtake of guitarist Lars Cölln casually warming up before recording. When I went through the takes at home later, something about it immediately stood out to me. I pitched it down, chopped it into different parts and turned it into the intro of the song. That was also the moment I completely abandoned the original acoustic guitar loop I had written the song to.”

This detail matters because “already know” feels born from exactly that kind of instinct: A stray fragment caught, lowered into shadow, reshaped until it becomes a doorway. MUANH says hush is “the most honest introduction to who I am as an artist right now,” and that honesty comes through in how fully she trusts softness – not as limitation, but as atmosphere, power, and identity. “For hush I really tried to stop worrying about whether something was too soft, too dreamy, or not cool enough,” she reflects. “I just wanted to make the music I genuinely wanted to hear.” The result is a song that feels fragile but deliberate, angsty but deeply held, a piece of dream-pop intimacy with a pulse warm enough to feel alive under the skin.

Uhhh
When you touch me like you mean it
Time folds into you
Uhhhh
And our shadows hit the curtain
In all shades of blue

“already know” is a song about the innocence before the question, the safety before the label, the sweetness of standing at the edge of change and not stepping forward yet. Its ache comes from knowing the moment can’t last forever; its beauty comes from holding it anyway. MUANH turns that in-between into a world of breath, shadow, blue light, and bone-deep feeling – intimate enough to feel whispered, lush enough to feel endless.

“How long ’til we can let it show?” she asks, and for one suspended, beautiful instant, the answer doesn’t matter. They already know.

How long ’til we can let it show?
You know that I already know
Your heartbeat rushing through my bones
I know that you already know

How long ’til we can let it show?
Your heartbeat rushing through my bones

* * *

* * *

The wider story behind hush begins with a different kind of recognition: Petry had to learn that the voice she’d been taught to doubt was the one she wanted to build her music around.

Growing up, she was repeatedly encouraged to sing louder, more powerfully, and even to pursue a safer career as a teacher. She became a teacher, but she kept making music, too. During the pandemic, she began producing in Ableton from her student apartment, finding chords by ear on a MIDI keyboard and following her curiosity wherever it led. Collaborations with other producers followed, and after moving to Hamburg, she began working with musicians from the city’s local scene. Yet the creative freedom she discovered in that little apartment remains fundamental to hush: Her voice belongs inside the arrangements, woven through hazy guitars and understated electronics, with ethereal harmonies rising over a languid R&B pulse.

“I’ve also realised that I don’t really separate songwriting and production,” MUANH explains. “The voice is part of the production. It’s just another instrument.”

There’s a deeply personal history beneath those musical instincts. Petry’s artist name draws on her middle name, Anh, and the Vietnamese words mưa (rain) and ánh (light), an embrace of opposing forces that resonates throughout her music. Her mother used to play Vietnamese singer Ngọc Lan at home, carrying memories of a country she missed; as a child, Petry found the songs unbearably cheesy, but she’s since returned to them with a new appreciation for their longing. Listening now brings her closer to her mother and to a part of herself she has come to understand differently. That inheritance echoes throughout hush, where the melodic sweetness of the pop records she grew up with meets a more elusive, contemporary sound, and where the most comforting melodies often carry the heaviest feelings.

Heard in sequence, the EP’s six songs reveal just how much can change between the first promise of love and the realization that you need to protect your own sense of self. Following “already know,” the beautifully brooding “baby please” extends an invitation to someone who has been carrying too much for too long. “Baby please, come with me / I will lay you down slowly,” MUANH sings, her voice offering refuge inside a softly enveloping arrangement. The imagery is tactile and disarmingly sweet – a gentle breeze, a blanket, the relief of being allowed to rest – but beneath that comforting surface is the concern that someone you love is coming apart. When she sings of seeing them burn out, the song’s tenderness acquires a more urgent purpose. “baby please” offers love as a place to recover, a little shelter from a world that keeps demanding more than we can give.

By the time “u wanna have it” arrives, that reassurance has begun to unravel. One of the EP’s most seductive and subtly propulsive moments, the song folds electric guitar and simmering bass into a restrained, almost narcotic electronic haze. Its soft JX-style synth textures hover beneath MUANH’s vocal, while the lyrics expose resentment building underneath a relationship that once promised safety. “What are you gonna do when the mask comes off?” she asks, a devastating question that cuts straight through the spell. The person who once seemed so easy to understand has become a source of uncertainty, and the music captures that contradiction with remarkable finesse: Sensual and brooding, full of movement yet seemingly unable to escape the tension at its center.

“the dream” pushes that conflict beyond romance, asking what happens when the person you’re trying to understand is yourself. Spellbinding and enveloping, its lush atmosphere gives way to a heavier musical undercurrent, with grungy, shoegaze-inspired guitars introducing a more forceful strain of anxiety. “You’re mistaking fear for peace,” MUANH sings near the beginning, and the words land with a different kind of urgency than the confessions on the EP’s earlier tracks. Here, the uncertainty belongs to a woman measuring the distance between her everyday life and the creative future she once imagined. “It’s the dream / but you settle down / in between,” goes the refrain, exposing the uneasy coexistence of stability and longing. The song’s darker textures make that internal struggle almost physical, as though the thoughts she has kept buried are beginning to press against the walls of the arrangement.

For Petry, the supposed dividing line between a safe profession and an artistic calling has never been so simple.

“It’s not really about wishing I’d chosen differently. I honestly love teaching,” she explains. “But music has always felt like this thing that’s just… there. It’s part of me whether I want it to be or not.”

What began on “already know” as the thrill of suspended possibility has become a far less comfortable kind of in-between. The question isn’t whether Petry has lived the wrong life; it’s how to honor all the parts of herself without allowing one to silence another. The song’s title begins to work on two levels – the dream she longs to pursue and the almost trance-like state of remaining suspended between possibility and action.

After the weight of “the dream,” “lotus” unfolds as a gorgeous, soothing reverie, its glistening atmosphere opening a moment of serenity. There’s a patient, almost weightless beauty to the song, as though MUANH is finally giving herself permission to exist without constantly measuring her life against someone else’s needs or expectations. The title itself suggests renewal, and within the EP’s larger progression, “lotus” becomes an important breath of possibility – the slow, delicate work of returning to yourself after losing sight of who you are.

And then comes “don’t compromise,” a compelling, consuming finale that closes hush in a wash of dreamy, cinematic beauty. Its lush soundscape gathers the EP’s emotional tension into a final act of resolve, letting the music carry a conviction that has been growing since the opening moments of “already know.” After six songs spent negotiating love, longing, and the pressure to become someone else, the closing title reads like a promise Petry is finally making to herself. Its significance reaches beyond any one relationship: To hold onto the instincts that brought her here, and to recognize that choosing her own voice is an act of care, too.

That may be the most affecting revelation at the center of hush. The word itself has two competing meanings: It can be the sound of someone gently comforting another person, or an instruction to fall silent. Petry understands both. For years, she was asked to make her voice bigger, stronger, different; now she has built an entire musical identity around its natural intimacy, discovering a kind of freedom in the very qualities she once questioned.

“The more I stopped trying to be cooler, louder, or different, the more the songs started sounding like me,” MUANH reflects.

Across its six songs, hush makes a beautiful case for listening closely – to a lover, to the words left unspoken, and ultimately to the instincts that tell us when we’ve given away too much of ourselves.

Its melodies offer comfort without disguising the complications beneath them, while its dreamy production invites us to linger inside feelings we might otherwise rush to escape. MUANH’s debut is a stirring introduction to an artist learning to trust herself fully, and that confidence gives even the gentlest passages a remarkable force. At a time when the world so often rewards those who shout the loudest, hush reminds us how much strength can live in a whisper.

Ahead of the EP’s October 23 release, Atwood Magazine caught up with MUANH to explore the memories behind “already know,” the musical instincts that shaped hush, and the freedom she’s found in letting her voice speak for itself. Read our intimate interview below, and get to know Atwood’s latest artist-to-watch as she draws us into her lush, brooding world, where the things we can’t quite say find their way out in song.

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:: connect with MUANH here ::

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Stream: ‘hush’ – MUANH

A CONVERSATION WITH MUANH

MUANH (Anna Anh Petry): As pretty and cliché as it sounds, I’ve always turned to music for comfort. The songs I make don’t try to solve anything. If they do anything at all, I hope they make people feel a little less alone inside whatever they’re feeling.

I think it’s for people who sometimes get overwhelmed by how loud everything is. I love a good pop melody, but I also need a song to create a world around me. Something you can sink into.

When I was a teenager, I used to make playlists for my German friends and they would always tell me, “This is music to fall asleep to.” I remember being slightly offended by that. Now I take it as a compliment. I guess I’ve always been more interested in atmosphere and nuance than in grabbing people’s attention immediately.

I’ve always been drawn to music that feels comforting rather than attention-grabbing. Music that lets you breathe a little. That’s probably what I’m trying to make with MUANH.

MUANH: I listened to a lot of Celine Dion, Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, Prince, Sade, Madonna, Dido, Enya, No Doubt, and those classic German Kuschelrock compilations. For the non-Germans reading this: basically collections of love songs your parents probably owned.

My mom also used to play Ngọc Lan all the time when I was growing up because she missed Vietnam a lot back then. As a kid, I found it incredibly cheesy. Now I catch myself returning to those songs. There’s so much longing in them, and looking back, they probably shaped me more than I realised. Listening to them now feels a bit like reconnecting with my mom and a part of myself at the same time. I usually end up calling her afterwards.

I’ve always been a fan of how Kelela and FKA twigs carved out their own space in the electronic and alternative music scene. I’ve been rooting for Kelela ever since Take Me Apart came out in 2017 and for FKA twigs since her first mixtape.

Over the last few years I’ve listened to a lot of Dijon, The Marías, Men I Trust, ML Buch, Mk.gee, and Love Spells.

MUANH: hush means a lot of different things to me. Part of it comes from my relationship with my voice. Growing up, I was often told I should sing louder or more powerfully. For a long time I felt like I had to become a different singer. Looking back, I think a lot of this EP is about letting go of that and trusting my instincts instead.

I also just love the word itself. The “sh” sound feels calming to me. It’s almost like breathing out. It’s the sound people make when they’re comforting someone. The songs themselves are about things that were often left unsaid. Unresolved feelings, relationships, letting go, finding your way back to yourself when you weren’t able to back then. A lot of people go through that cycle of pouring love and care into someone else before eventually realising they need to offer some of that same kindness to themselves.

Each song captures a different stage of that process. already know sits at the very beginning when everything feels exciting and full of possibility. u wanna have it comes later, when the cracks start showing and the things you’ve been suppressing begin to surface.

At the same time, hush feels like the most honest introduction to who I am as an artist right now. It’s probably the closest I’ve come to fully trusting my own taste and intuition.

MUANH: Because it captures a lot of what hush is about.

The song sounds soft and restrained, but underneath there’s frustration, disappointment, and a growing awareness that something isn’t right. As someone who hates conflict, I know this feeling a little too well. I think a lot of people do.

It also felt like a good introduction sonically. The atmosphere, the tension, the softness, the little bit of darkness underneath it all. It felt like opening the door to the world of the EP.

MUANH: It’s actually the beginning of the journey.

It’s the feeling of “I love you” before you’ve actually said it. Everything still feels possible and you’re living more in the feeling than in reality.

I wanted the song to feel warm and suspended in time, like it’s holding onto that moment for just a little longer. It’s the escape and procrastination of staying in possibility before reality catches up. Sometimes those early feelings are so beautiful that you don’t want to move forward because saying things out loud means risking that something could change.

MUANH: A lot of hush deals with unresolved feelings, difficult realisations, and eventually letting go.

already know exists before any of that. Nothing has gone wrong yet.

It’s that rare moment where you’re completely present inside a feeling without questioning it. Knowing where the rest of the EP goes almost makes the song feel bittersweet to me now because it’s capturing the innocence of a moment that can’t really last forever.

MUANH: It’s funny because I only started listening to The Marías after someone told me my music reminded them of them. I immediately fell down a rabbit hole and felt very honoured by the comparison and then actually became inspired.

One thing I’ve become more confident about over the last few years is trusting my intuition. For hush I really tried to stop worrying about whether something was too soft, too dreamy, or not cool enough. I just wanted to make the music I genuinely wanted to hear.

I’ve also realised that I don’t really separate songwriting and production. The voice is part of the production. It’s just another instrument.

That’s why being involved in the production process is so important. I’ve never been very good at just writing a topline and walking away. I need the vocal to feel like it belongs to the same world as everything else happening in the song.

Sometimes that means it’s sitting a little deeper inside the atmosphere than people might expect, but I love that feeling. I think that’s also why production became such an important part of my artistic identity. I’m much more interested in creating a complete sound world than having every element compete for attention. But I‘m not stuck to that idea anymore.

Ironically, now that I’ve finally allowed myself to fully embrace softness, I feel much more curious about exploring darker sounds, collaborating with other producers, and pushing my voice in new directions. The difference is that now it’s coming from curiosity rather than insecurity.

MUANH: The song grew out of a week where I felt like I was watching my life from the outside.

I found myself coming back to the same question I’d been asking myself for years: What would’ve happened if I’d gone all in on music earlier? At some point that turned into the line, “it’s the dream, but you settle down in between.”

It’s not really about wishing I’d chosen differently. I honestly love teaching. But music has always felt like this thing that’s just… there. It’s part of me whether I want it to be or not. Teaching asks me to be organized, to set boundaries, to hold everything together. With music, I almost forget all of that. I forget to eat, I lose track of time- it kind of takes over. I lose myself in a dream basically. I guess the song is really about that tension, and about the distance that can grow between the life you’re living and the one you keep imagining.

Sonically, I wanted to explore a darker side of my sound. I love experimenting with different textures from song to song, and for this one I felt like I was missing something heavier. That’s where the grungy, shoegaze-inspired guitars came in as they add a weight and tension.

MUANH: It sounds so ordinary and cheesy, but I hope people find comfort in it. Not because the songs are necessarily happy. If anything, some of them are quite sad. To me, comfort isn’t always about feeling happy – it’s about feeling held. And that’s what I hope my music can feel like for other people, too.

Making this EP taught me that the things I was insecure about were often the things that made my music feel most like mine. For years I worried that my voice was too soft. In the end, embracing that softness became one of the main themes of the project.

More broadly, I think it taught me that there’s a lot of freedom in letting go of who you think you’re supposed to be. Whether that’s in music, relationships, or life in general. The more I stopped trying to be cooler, louder, or different, the more the songs started sounding like me.

MUANH: I’ve been listening to Love Spells a lot recently. Been listening on repeat, actually.

I still listen to a lot of the artists I grew up with. Dido, Enya, Cocteau Twins, Madonna, to name a few. They’re all artists I keep coming back to. They understand something about atmosphere and emotion that never really goes out of style.

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:: connect with MUANH here ::

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Stream: “already know” – MUANH

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