The name came first, and it was borrowed. Hunter Park was a teenager in Charleston when she read that the girl's name Anaba translates as “she returns from war,” and the phrase stuck. “Whoa, I can get down with that,” is how she remembers it. Raised by her grandmother, she came out as trans in high school, in a city with little vocabulary for it. A band name about a woman walking home from the fight was less a pose than a plan.
The early records were modest: two EPs in 2014, Coyote Soda and a self-titled four-track, then the 2015 debut Oh, What A Love. Mirrored Moon Dance Hall took three years after that. Park handed the songs to Wolfgang Zimmerman, the Charleston producer behind Brave Baby and Band of Horses records, and what emerged from his Rialto Row studio in September 2018 was electric, layered, weather-heavy, the bare-bones folk of the debut swapped for what she calls cosmic Americana. The label she and her producer later coined, tropical goth country, fits it too.
It was a village record. Tyler Morris of ET Anderson adds what Park calls “this perfectly displaced mathematical quality to a few songs over the record,” Jordan Igoe sings, and a roll call of Charleston players passes through: Corey Campbell of Susto, Christian Chidester of Brave Baby, Grace Joyner, Clay Houle, Kelly Morris, Jenna Desmond, Caryn Egan. Thieves was cut at the Royal American during a solar eclipse, one acoustic guitar and one microphone. The titles map the terrain: Psychic Voyage, Swamp Witch, Starry Melancholy, Quitting Smoking. Park's own summary was a refusal: “I'm not just folk, I'm not just country, I'm not just rock.”
What makes her writing distinctive is not the genre-straddling, which half of Americana now claims, but the refusal to soften anything. The songs are dark in specific rather than decorative ways, their central figure an empowered woman worn thin by other people's ignorance. Within weeks of release a track from the album turned up on NPR's New Music Friday playlist. Then Band of Horses drummer Creighton Barrett suggested her to Ben Bridwell, who called: five western dates as support from late February 2019. “I'm looking forward to sharing the stage with some of my heroes,” she said.
Since then the arc has bent outward. The single Snakeskin Boots arrived in autumn 2021, pedal steel and strange layering, produced with Joel Hamilton and Zimmerman. Ruthless followed in November 2023, wry and indie-pop-leaning, homesick for Nashville friends in Edgefield, and voted the No. 2 South Carolina album of the year. She lives in Nashville now. Mirrored Moon Dance Hall remains the hinge: the moment a Charleston songwriter with her grandmother's fight in her stopped making small records.
