There’s a lot of buzz right now about Anyma Ora, whose real name is Danyka Sioui. The Wendat musician from Wendake, a suburb of Quebec City, won ROSEQ, Stingray, and LOJIQ awards in 2025. She has been touring extensively in Quebec in recent months and will continue to do so this fall.
“It’s definitely a great honor to be performing on the main stage at the Présence Autochtone festival,” she tells me in an interview. “With this kind of event, in a big city, you can also sense an openness from non-Indigenous people toward our culture, and that’s amazing,” adds Anyma-Danyka.
Yet her discography is tiny: an EP, Humans, released in 2021, and a single from this year, Fish. Her music leans toward electro-pop, with lyrics in English. But it’s when you see her on stage—where she blends these tracks with traditional Wendat songs, dance…and her live voice, which takes on all sorts of inflections—that you realize Anyma Ora has incredible potential.
“For me, being Indigenous doesn’t mean you have to make traditional music,” says this daughter of musicians, who grew up listening to pop and attended elementary and high school in English. Her father, Gaétan Sioui, produced and composed music that sought to fuse tradition and modernity in the early 2000s.
“He passed on his passion for music to me; when I was 4 or 5 years old, he used to make me listen to Pink Floyd at full volume,” Danyka says with a hint of sadness, as her father passed away in 2014 at the age of 49.
On stage at Place des Festivals, however, there are many nods to Indigenous culture. And it’s when she sings a song in Wendat—that nearly extinct language Anyma is currently learning—against a subtle backdrop of electronic keyboard, that her soul and her voice pierce us most deeply.
It’s important to understand that the young artist is still defining her artistic path. Although she sings in English, she addressed the crowd exclusively in French, which she speaks like a girl from Quebec City.
“I’ve started writing a song in French, but it’s totally different from what I do in English,” she told me.
Anyka Ora is also considering a record project in the Wendat language. “But I want to take as much time as it takes, deepen my knowledge of the language, and visit the communities before I do it.”
In the meantime, a second EP will be released soon, from which Anyma sang a few tracks on Wednesday night. Polished, meditative electro-pop—a logical follow-up to Humans, but a touch more sophisticated.
By a twist of fate, I was accompanied by a young British man, a student at an American university, who was visiting Montreal for the first time.
“Wow, she’s really fantastic,” he kept telling me over and over, convinced that she was a local music star. That goes some way toward explaining the potential I’ve been talking about. To be continued…
