Anohni searches for hope at the end of the world

In the fall of 2020, as North Americans reeled from months of protests over police brutality and grappled with the prospect of a long winter spent in lockdown, Anohni released a cover of Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive.” Recorded over a decade earlier, the English-born, New York-based singer’s haunting, stripped-back rendition appeared like a distant but steady beacon of hope, or at least a fortification against what felt like an ever-escalating moment of environmental and political chaos.

For fans, the song also signalled a return from an artist who had remained mostly dormant since the release of 2016’s “Hopelessness” — an explosive protest album that tackled subjects like drone warfare, torture and ecological destruction in the waning years of the Obama administration. Featuring jagged electronic production, the album also marked a stunning reinvention for an artist who, since the early 2000s, was best known as the lead singer and songwriter for the art-pop group Anohni and the Johnsons (formerly known as Antony and the Johnsons).

On Thursday, Anohni, 51, released “My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross,” her sixth studio album and the long-awaited followup to “Hopelessness.” Arriving amid historic wildfires and rising anti-trans violence, the album sees the artist — whose celestial, sonorous voice remains a singular force of nature — resume her role as a radical truth-teller.

But while rooted in the same pain that inspired her last record, “My Back Was A Bridge” is a far gentler project. In place of rage is a profound call to arms; a challenge to imagine another world.

“The truth is that our love / Will ricochet through eternity,” Anohni sings on album opener “It Must Change,” a soulful, galvanizing protest song that — like the Marvin Gaye album that inspired it — derives its power not from anger, but from tender affirmation.

“I am singing from a less weaponized place,” Anohni tells me over Zoom from her Manhattan home, which would soon be blanketed by a thick veil of smoke. “This is a transformative moment. But what’s being asked of us is Olympic, to make a kind of collective shift that’s almost impossible to conceive of.”

“This is a time of reckoning.”

Anohni keeps her camera off for the duration of our hour-long conversation. This is unsurprising. For much of her career, she has largely avoided the limelight — she tours sparingly, and her music videos often star models or activists (Naomi Campbell in “Drone Bomb Me,” Munroe Bergdorf “It Must Change”). But though I can’t see her face, I can feel the weight of her presence, and the generosity of her spirit. She speaks with a soft English lilt, and takes reflective pauses after each of my questions. Her responses are long and winding, but reveal a deeply considered world view, one rooted in a radical and transformative philosophy she refers to as “future feminism.”

Early in our conversation, I ask her to explain the spoken word interlude that occurs midway through “It Must Change.”

You know how they always said / That light was the opposite of darkness?

It’s just fire in darkness / Creating life

“One of the most brutal lenses is this expectation of a binary reality,” she explains, referring to our tendency to see the world in black and white; to view people as male or female; to understand the world in terms of good or evil.

“It was a revelation when I came to terms with the fact that daylight was an optical illusion created by the atmosphere, and that what was really out there was an ocean of voluptuous darkness. In that black womb, there were stars, and those stars were balls of fire that emit light. And that wasn’t the same thing as half black and half white. It was an ocean of darkness peppered with fire.”

She continues, her tone thoughtful. “It is a much more spectral and expansive reverie.”

Born in Chichester, England, Anohni and her family moved to San Francisco when she was 10. In the early 1990s, she relocated to Manhattan, where she immersed herself in the city’s queer and experimental arts community. In 1992, she founded The Blacklips Performance Cult, an avant-garde drag theatre troupe.

By the mid-1990s, Anohni began performing with the Johnsons, a group of her musical collaborators named in honour of Marsha P. Johnson, a gay and trans rights activist and a key figure during the Stonewall Uprisings of 1969. (In a recent Instagram post Anohni described meeting Johnson a week before her untimely death in 1992 and referred to her as “the Rosa Parks of the trans and gay Civil rights movements.”)

In the early 2000s, Anohni connected with Lou Reed, lending her voice — which critic Brandon Stosuy once described as a blend of Nina Simone, Bryan Ferry and Jimmy Scott — to newly worked renditions of songs like “Perfect Day” and the Velvet Underground classic “Candy Says.”

But her breakout occurred in 2005 with the release of the Johnsons’ second album “I Am A Bird Now” — a gorgeous collection of songs that explored themes of gender identity, friendship, the rapture of joy, and the spectre of death, and featured appearances from Boy George, Rufus Wainwright and Devendra Banhart. The record won the prestigious Mercury Prize for the best album by a British or Irish act, and was later listed among The Guardian’s best albums of the 21st century.

Over the next decade, the Johnsons released two more critically acclaimed albums, as Anohni became an in-demand collaborator, linking up with a diverse range of artists, from Björk to the nu-disco band Hercules and Love Affair to conceptual artist Marina Abramovic.

But it was “Hopelessness” that marked the beginning of something new. “It threw a spanner in the works, stylistically,” Anohni admits. Gone were the piano ballads and baroque arrangements, replaced instead by razor-sharp digital soundscapes and lyrics brimming with rage.

“My singing voice had been a place that people tended to trust as a consoling voice, or certainly they presumed it was empathetic” she says. “The last album sort of disrupted that assumption.”

“I didn’t know if I was going to make another record,” she adds.

With the rise of Trumpism in 2016 and the tumultuous period that followed, Anohni felt compelled to reconsider how to participate in the moment. “I spent most of the time just watching,” she explained. “I took some time to reflect on where I was. What emerged, very organically, was this record.”

Written alongside songwriter and producer Jimmy Hogarth, “My Back Was A Bridge” bears some resemblance to her earlier sound, but also explores new sonic territory — the record marks her first guitar-based, rather than piano-based project, and the first she’s written collaboratively.

The result is a dynamic blend of rock, soul and R&B, one that contains both moments of poignant beauty — the downtempo “Sliver Of Ice” reimagines a conversation Anohni had with Reed during his final weeks, in which he described the “ecstatic experience” of tasting ice on his tongue — and soaring catharsis. On the cacophonous “Go Ahead,” Anohni lashes out over a dissonant thrash of electric guitar as a lemur shrieks wildly in the background.

Elsewhere, Anohni interrogates a darker theme: violence or sexual abuse enacted upon those who are vulnerable — a dynamic, as she describes it, “where an annihilating force doesn’t even recognize your humanity.”

“I remember going to a pet shop when I was 26, and they were putting a newborn mouse into a cage for a snake to eat,” she recalls. “I remember looking at the little thing and thinking: ‘It doesn’t have a chance. Its destiny is laid out before it.”

“You’re so killable / Just so killable” she sings on “Scapegoat,” a harrowing song that Anohni says she felt impelled to write after reading about “dancing boys” — a term that describes an outlawed custom in certain regions of Afghanistan involving sexual slavery and child prostitution. “It’s not personal / It’s just the way you were born / And in this society / A scapegoat is all I can be,” she adds, describing with a trembling voice various forms of violence as the song builds towards a wailing guitar solo.

“A lot of people who have suffered in the ways outlined in that song rationalize it by thinking that they are somehow to blame,” she explains. “Or that they somehow deserved it — that it was somehow a reflection of a truth about them.”

“The revelation that ‘it’s not personal’ gave me sort of a back door from which I could escape some of those experiences that had reorganized me, utterly, as a kid … ‘It’s not personal’ meant that there’s a part of anyone that’s undergoing an experience like that that is beyond the reach of any amount of brutality — even murder. There’s a sacred part of the person, a private self that can never be hurt. There is (a part) that remains untouched, remains unscathed.”

“Scapegoat” contains parallels to the rising tide of anti-trans violence and the systemic crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights in the U.S. and beyond — a trend that Anohni says has been deceptively described as a “culture war.”

“They call it a culture war when one group of people seeks to degrade or annihilate another,” she says. “But that’s not a war. A war requires two weaponized parties. What they call a culture war is actually an act of murder, an act of genocide.”

Perhaps Anohni’s greatest gift as a songwriter is her ability to convey what it feels like to live in a time of accelerating environmental destruction; to attend to or even embrace the complicated emotions — rage, anguish — of existing in an age of extinction.

“I’m gonna miss the bees / I’ll miss the things that grow,” she sang with childlike innocence on “Another World,” a stirring piano ballad from 2008. In 2015, she collaborated with composer J. Ralph on the Oscar-nominated song “Manta Ray,” which imagined the viewpoint of an endangered species facing extinction. On “There Wasn’t Enough” from “My Back Is A Bridge,” she describes the cruelty that capitalist systems assert upon the landscape: “Grab the earth / Take her life / Chain her life” she sings.

“I don’t think it’s inappropriate to feel what’s really happening and to feel bad about it, or for it to hurt,” she says.

I asked her how she counters the type of despair that might attend such a grim outlook. “I don’t really try to counter it. I embrace it,” she explains. “It’s a feeling we have to walk through. This is what’s being asked of us: to be present in this moment, to be awake to what’s really happening.”

She continues: “Let’s try to be honest about who we are and where we stand and what’s happened on the land and what’s happening on the land. And let’s try to feel that, and not to punish oneself. Let’s also try to be gracious with ourselves in that process and tender with ourselves and forgiving of ourselves for our complicity in these processes. Because the guilt and shame is just going to paralyze and annihilate your agency. And it’s fine to touch on guilt and shame, but it’s not a productive stance to wallow in it.”

As Anohni speaks, It’s clear that her vision of a path forward exists beyond the paradigms that our current society works within — that spectral and expansive place.

“I’m grappling with life on life’s terms, and hopefully that’s going to be useful, or fortifying for people in their own processes. That’s what I hope,” she says. “Even though the material is heavy, my intention isn’t to burden people. It’s actually just a relief to just tell the truth.”

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