There are hungers that keep us alive, and hungers that consume us. Across thirteen songs on her new album Frog in the Belly of a Snake, singer-songwriter and producer Johanna Warren twists and winds through the unruly terrain of human appetites: hunger for food, hunger for love, hunger for freedom, for glory, connection, annihilation. Sometimes desire saves you. Sometimes it makes you ridiculous. Sometimes you need to let go of what you're desperately trying to possess. Sometimes a fantasy has to be composted so that a real live garden can grow.  

A dark ecological eroticism runs rampant throughout the album. On the title track, Warren chants: “I have already been obliterated, I am a frog in the belly of a snake/ I am one with you, my creator, my destroyer/ In the sweet orgasm of death.” The image is both gruesome and ecstatic. That blurring of duality defines the record. Frog in the Belly of a Snake is both cosmic and profane, sexy and depressing, furious and funny. In “Wildcrafted,” foraging for a rare medicinal plant is a metaphor for finding a human mate: “I’ll know the scent of the roots and the shape of the leaves,” Warren coos over a spooky soundscape of birdcalls and big drums, “I’ll know the moment I lay my eyes on this wild lover/ If he holds the medicine I need.” Ever a shape-shifting, slippery narrator, Warren can casually mention the Buddhist concept of Samsara in one breath and call herself out for ill-advised late-night sexting in the next.  

Warren’s production choices are psychedelically eclectic: lush arrangements, often involving found objects such as glass bottles and pieces of scrap metal, give way to stark a cappella invocations. Rogue field recordings from Warren’s extensive travels (drag queens clacking over a metal bridge in stilettos at midnight, a Welsh farmer complaining about filling in forms, a friend’s newborn baby cooing and gurgling) add layers of autobiographical depth and sonic mystery.  

Much of the foundational tracking was done live to tape at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate, UK, with CJ Jones on drums and Tom Sansbury on bass, while Warren was finishing up her last studio album, Lessons for Mutants (2022). “I figured while we had the tape machine calibrated and all of us under the same roof, we might as well lay down some demos of a few new songs,” Warren explains. 

But in 2023, Warren publicly stepped back from music indefinitely to focus on her health. After a traumatic childhood and decades of living with chronic illness, addiction, disordered eating and the relentless demands of a musical career, Warren reached a breaking point. She had spent years pushing through or numbing pain, overriding her body’s demands, contorting herself to meet expectations, and searching outside herself for some semblance of safety. It clearly wasn’t working. A Type 1 Diabetic since age nine, she was starting to experience complications from a lifetime of erratic blood sugars: neuropathy in her right arm was making it impossible to play guitar, and one of her eyes was showing signs of diabetic retinopathy. On top of that, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia from toxic mould exposure were making it hard to get out of bed most days. “My body was staging a protest,” Warren says. “A riot. And rightly so. It had been petitioning me for years to make some serious changes, and I let it get to a point where it stopped asking nicely and started throwing Molotov cocktails in the streets.” 

In addition to this pile-up of physical symptoms, Warren was experiencing increasing psychological and emotional resistance to her vocation as a touring musician. Plagued by performance anxiety, profoundly lonely, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, and increasingly disillusioned by the music industry, she started seriously contemplating doing something else with her life. Music, which had once been her salvation, had turned into a trap. So she freed herself from it. 

In the reclusive, introspective years that followed, Warren fully grieved the death of her dream. “I had to let it all go. The ego attachment to ‘being a musician.’ Who was I without that? That’s what I needed to find out. The whole time I was chasing the dream of ‘making it,’ whatever that even means, I was running from a lot of pain. I needed to get quiet and tend to the wound.” And in that space of surrender—with a great deal of help from the natural world (Warren is a passionate herbalist and forager) and her local community (especially a cohort of young regenerative landworkers growing organic vegetables in the rural Welsh village Warren now calls home)—her body healed remarkably, and her desire to make music returned, in what feels like an entirely new way: “When I was younger, I was consumed by this burning, gnawing ambition eating away at me from the inside. Now I feel full.”  

When she revisited her 2022 ‘demos’ three years later, she knew they were not just demos. “There was a freedom and a lightness in our playing, because we were just messing around, with none of the pressure or heaviness of making a record.” Over the next year, Warren continued to chip away at recording additional songs and layers of production in her bedroom in Wales, and completed tracking during a winter artist residency in New Jersey at Soul Selects Studio.  

The resulting album is not an account of personal recovery so much as it is a prayer for collective regeneration. It opens with “Web,” a simple mantra that steadily expands in concentric circles like a ripple in a still pond: “I am in the center of a web of healing/ I am here to heal me / I am here to help you heal you.” From that central starting point, Warren follows the threads of the web in many directions. “The Current” looks backward and forward through generations, exploring the possibility of breaking inherited patterns rather than passing them on. “Automatic” finds the narrator exhausted by the endless cycle of striving, falling, trying again, and discovering that the only home she can ultimately count on is the one inside herself. “Islamorada” gives voice to a painfully desperate longing to be chosen, and “Voice of Reason” details the hazards of trying to be who someone else wants you to be. “Bathwater Baby” is a lullaby for one’s inner child: “It's okay sweetheart, I’m here to protect you/ You can go to sleep now, I’ve got you covered.” And “Silver Light” holds up a mirror to the nightmare of late capitalism: “They sold our wildness, and they’re trying to sell it back as a luxury,” Warren howls with mournful ferocity, concluding: “The Earth wants to feed us for free!”   

The final song boils everything down to a handful of repeating words, sung as a round by a choir of Warren’s friends around the world, including Rain Phoenix, Elvis Perkins, Vera Sola, Cornelia Murr, and Warren’s dad Chris: “I remember you feeding me feeding you feeding me feeding you feeding me feeding you.” The grand conclusion is a simple reminder of interconnectedness and reciprocity: between human beings, between generations, between body and mind, between humans and the rest of the natural world. We are creatures that eat and get eaten. We inherit things from the dead and pass things on to the newborn. We are porous and hopelessly relational creatures, whether we like it or not.  

The web closes where it began: we are hungry. We are alive. We need each other.