Anastasia Rydlevskaya has the right to stop being nice
Women are often expected to make their pain easy to be around. You can be heartbroken, but try not to be bitter. You can talk about what happened, but nobody wants to hear it forever. Be angry if you must, then forgive, move on and become a better person. Somewhere in those instructions, the person who was hurt gets handed another job: protecting everyone else from the mess. Anastasia Rydlevskaya’s fourth album, Alchemia, makes room for a woman who has had enough of that work. Written and recorded in her bedroom in Poland, it follows betrayal, shame and the frightening effort of finding yourself again after a traumatic relationship. Rydlevskaya builds its story around alchemy, using stages of transformation to trace a life coming apart and taking another shape. Beneath the mythology sits a painfully ordinary question. How do you begin to trust yourself when you have spent so long questioning what you feel? Sometimes the first step is admitting that you are furious, even when you still miss the person who hurt you.
A bedroom can hold all of that without looking any different from the outside. The washing still needs putting away. Your phone still lights up. You lie awake going over a conversation, trying to work out whether you asked for too much or somehow said it wrong. For Rydlevskaya, that private space also became the place where she made Alchemia. She wrote, produced and recorded the album herself, doing most of the mixing and mastering before bringing in her friend Aliaksandr Karneichuk for the finishing work. It is easy to romanticise this kind of independence, as though working alone were always a beautiful choice rather than something exhausting. But the freedom to make decisions matters here. She could decide how much to reveal, when to be uncomfortable and which feelings deserved to stay. After a relationship that has unsettled your sense of yourself, even a small decision can feel heavy. Having authority over an entire project gives the album’s concern with personal freedom something tangible. The person making it gets to keep the last word.
Recovery can feel especially lonely when everybody assumes you should be getting better by now. Friends have heard the story. You have heard your own promises to stop checking, stop remembering, stop caring. A good afternoon can make the next bad morning feel like failure. Alchemia’s framework gives this confusion somewhere to go. Its four main stages, Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas and Rubedo, take the central character through collapse, anger and the emergence of a changed self. The release’s accompanying account describes a suicidal crisis in the opening section, followed by a growing refusal to seek approval from the person who caused the pain. This is an artistic story, and it deserves to be approached without turning it into a lesson about how anyone ought to heal. Rydlevskaya also brings her experiences of Tourette’s and bipolar disorder into her wider work. Those disclosures ask for care, particularly from an audience eager to explain a woman through a diagnosis. She is making choices about language, character and what she shares. We can take her experiences seriously while leaving her the freedom to be complicated, funny, angry or impossible to neatly understand.
Anger is where the album’s story becomes especially charged. Its final transformation centres on Lilith, whom Rydlevskaya presents as a figure of feminine independence, unwilling to submit or offer forgiveness on demand. The attraction is understandable if you have ever softened a message five times before sending it, then added a smiley face because the full stop looked hostile. So much energy goes into making a boundary sound pleasant. We explain why we cannot do something, apologise for needing space and worry about being called selfish before we have even asked for what we need. Alchemia lets its central woman reach the end of that patience. Yet its imagery of retribution brings another feeling into view: the exhaustion of still having someone at the centre of your life when you desperately want them out of it. Wanting them to understand can become its own trap. You imagine the conversation in which they finally admit what happened, as though their agreement might give you permission to feel hurt. The possibility of walking away without that admission is frightening. It means accepting that your account matters even if they never acknowledge it.
Rydlevskaya’s visual world gives this struggle another form. Originally from Belarus and now living in Poland, she works across music, art and performance, using handmade embroidered masks in her live appearances. A mask can offer a small freedom: you choose how people see you. That feels significant when women are so often asked to prove their honesty by exposing more of themselves. Tell us what happened. Tell us how bad it was. Let us decide whether your response is reasonable. An artist who shares something painful can quickly find that the audience expects access to everything around it. Released on 25 September, Alchemia opens a part of Rydlevskaya’s private life through a story she has shaped herself. Myth and performance give her room to decide what belongs in that story and what stays hers. Its emotional pull lies in the woman it allows to emerge: someone who can still be wounded and have a boundary, still feel love and choose to leave. Someone who does not have to wait until she is calm enough, kind enough or completely healed before she believes her own voice.