A tour of Beaks’ nightdream nation

No, really. She lays her head down in vehement opposition to that whole there’s-nothing-more-boring-than-other-people’s-dreams take. Dreaming is almost half of your life, the songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and model says – it’s a cornerstone of who you are. 

“I dream so much that it almost feels like I lay down at night to live my second life. I could go on about this for hours,” she warns me, habitually stretching as if mere chat about dreams (and the almost-40-degree Vienna weather) threatens to induce them. 

Francesca scribbles down her night moves as soon as she wakes up. When a friend sleeps over, the first words they exchange are, what did you dream about? “To me, dreaming is like a second dimension,” she says, taking thoughtful pauses before offering deliberate explanations. “I read a book about dreams, and they say that you can try to interpret your dreams and do whatever you want, but you will always talk or think about your dreams with your conscious and awake persona.”

This uncloseable gap, this white whale, is the conflict at the centre of her music: a cogent ego trying to wrangle an elusive id. So far, that music has arrived in the form of standalone vignettes – singles – whose production evokes that blissful, brittle bardo state where nostalgia prickles your skin and there’s the vague understanding that the scene will soon slip through your fingers. 

Beaks’ songs are not dreamy in, say, the Cocteau Twins way: there’s a starkness and up-close intimacy that isn’t dissimilar to what Lali Puna were doing back on Faking the Books. Francesca sings exhausted but effortless, splitting the difference between a pillow whisper and lips-to-ear chat on the last bus home, but it’s always audible and delivered with conspiratorial clarity. On the receiving end, you, the listener, feel safe but a little paranoid, as though she’s a benevolent ghost leading you out of a castle, wearily because she’s been doing this same routine with waylaid tourists for decades. 

Francesca’s dreamwork is already well documented: in other press as well as in her lyrics. “How do dreams work?” she asked on the 2024 single “Dirty Girls”. But since that song, she hasn’t stopped trying to answer the question, and when I ask what Wikipedia rabbit holes she’s been down lately, the answer comes with a half-guilty shrug: dreams. 

As for her instrumentals, goth-pop hooks are injected with big-city punk coolness. There are plinky, slinky guitar meanderings and snappy programmed snares. A track such as “White Lies” unleashes a hair-raising volume of fuzzy synth-bass that recalls Broadcast’s industrial hauntings, while “Venom” is closer to a vampiric Dry Cleaning, evoking a solitary Halloween party on a spaceship or something. 

“It’s always been hard for me to describe my music,” Francesca says, citing Daydream Nation’s noise x spoken-word melange and Memo Boy’s “electronic and computer-produced” direction as contrasting touchpoints. “I mostly just say indie punk, which translates a little more if you see me play live with the band, because that’s a little bit of a different experience and a little wilder than the records.”

She’s working on taking this wild, dreamy show further from central Europe, a region she’s all but conquered, having sold out the fabled 8MM club in Berlin two nights in a row earlier this year – something that bodes well for her set at the city’s Pop Kultur Festival later this month alongside fellow faux-retro punky synthy mumblers Automatic. 

“It’s like a huge scene spot,” she says of 8MM. “All of the musicians and all the punk bands are there, but I feel like for me it was always important to get out of Austria and Germany and have my music reach people everywhere, which I’m trying to do now.” There’s an element of seizing the day here: “I’m lucky at the moment to be able to continue making music, to be able to travel places to play shows. So sometimes I have to remind myself, like, come on, remember who you are. Get up, do your work.” 

That’s partly because Vienna has a way of making you forget how to move, she says. “I feel like the DIY scene, regarding shows being thrown, is not the best,” she goes on. “There’s always people doing something, there’s always things going on, but there’s a lack of venues that like to host DIY projects because venues are booked out months in advance.”

Friends of hers stepped in to take over a midcentury studio complex, turning it into a multidisciplinary arts space after the long-term landlord died, and renting out rooms to everyone from jewellery makers to graphic designers. “Most of the rooms still have the same equipment they had in the ‘60s, ‘70s, like the huge mixers, crazy stuff,” she says, having tracked many of her songs there, the vintage warmth and historical lineage rubbing off a little on the recordings. 

Other positives: she points to several queer collectives that have sprung up over the last few years – soundsqueervienna, for example – and she and some friends are in the process of putting on their own show. Things are in the works, moving at that sleepy Vienna pace, and as always, it’s the people that make the place move. Many of them star in the video for her latest single, “TY (robbed the bank)”. They frolic around the park under a high sun like a litter of golden retrievers as she breathily murmurs the main hook, “I love my friends.” 

The close-up of a guy with a big smile – that’s Markus Windisch, her producer. “Then Juanita, who shot most of the video, she’s my best friend,” Francesca explains. “She’s the one where, in the song, I say, ‘stay over, sleep on the sofa, leave me a note, wear my pullover’ – she always sleeps over at my place, and then she goes to work in the morning, and she’s like leaving me a note like, ‘have a great day.’ I went through a lot last year, and sometimes you have to remember what you have and how lucky you are to always have people who support you, and they’re always there for me, and they help me through the hard times.”

In a way it feels like her most reality-grounded track so far, wide awake and looking around at what she has. That’s not a deliberate swivel, though. She tells me that she writes “intuitively and impulsively. I don’t make concepts or stuff like that.” It’s an approach party inspired by the Beat Generation's work – “they were all sexist and stuff like that, I’m not saying that I agree with that,” she cautions – but how they changed what writing could be: on-fire and all in the first take. “I love music. I’m super interested in music, but I think a lot of my inspiration comes from writers.”

She’s careful to keep the process loose and lose-yourself like the Beats did: recording a quick song on a park bench with Markus in between soundcheck and show, cos why not. Or they’ll play around in the studio one day “and then six hours later, we’re like, woah, we should drink some water.” 

“Sometimes you have to do your chores. Sometimes you have to go through the mixes. Sometimes you have to re-record stuff. I’ll take that,” she says. “That’s part of it. That’s fine, but I never want to lose the fun in it and the playful approach and the passion that I have for it.”

Accordingly, she has one commandment: “I always have to finish the song in one day.”

“Of course, there’s some tweaks you’re gonna make. Maybe you’re gonna change the drums or whatever,” she elaborates. “But the whole structure, the lyrics – it has to be done in one day because I will not be able to access the same feeling on a different day, and then I will not like what I did. That’s why I’m so impressed by people who make films or stuff like that.”

It makes total sense: if you’ve ever scrambled to re-enter a dream after waking up before the ending, you’ll understand. 

We talk a lot about Beaks’ forthcoming new music, which we’re not actually allowed to talk about, but I can tell you how her feelings around releasing music have developed. “I felt like I was getting naked in front of the whole world,” she says of her first ever single, “I Dropped the Bottle”, released back in 2023. She panicked and called a friend the night before, realising she was about to surrender a level of privacy that most of us take for granted. But she’s gradually become aware that when we listen to other artists, we simply decide to stick or twist – we don’t overanalyse their life choices. 

“It helps to remember that no one really cares about you, that no one gives a fuck to be honest,” she says. “It’s not always about me, you know.”

All that said, Anna Francesca is proof that other people’s dreams can not only make you give several fucks – they can fuel one of the most promising and compelling careers in modern indie rock, one that has all the time in our world, and all the time in a dreamworld somewhere beyond the clouds, only accessible when the sun looks away.