Anohni, the truth-teller

After years of silence, at least on record, the first thing Anohni sings on her new album My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross is an order: “It must change.” She sings it like a mantra, or a kind of vocal warmup, her voice honeyed and horrified in turn. She repeats it four times, in case you miss how much she means it – in case your relief that she’s singing again might get in the way of understanding why.

She made that ‘why’ clear to me one fall afternoon, over a Zoom call that billowed from one hour into three, each full of engaged give and take. “The Doomsday Clock is about ten seconds to midnight, according to the scientists,” she says. Her camera was off, but her voice was giving visions. “The rest of the world is waiting for us to refresh our relationship with reality.”

Like a lot of us in this beautiful, terrible world, Anohni had been feeling hopeless. The seeds she had planted in the New York underground in the 1990s – first, as a member of the “performance art cult” Blacklips, whose multimedia work was recently chronicled in a book; then, with her band the Johnsons, as a gentle chronicler of devastations, from the AIDS epidemic to the ongoing environmental apocalypse – had blossomed into a career of sold-out shows everywhere from Radio City Music Hall to the Sydney Opera House. Her 2005 album I Am a Bird Now, in which the closest thing to a mainstream pop song was the glorious Fistful of Love, a sort of Dusty in Memphis take on Master and Servant, won the Mercury Prize. Blind, the instant classic 2008 single with Hercules and Love Affair, found her playing a kind of Sylvester to longtime friend Andy Butler’s Patrick Cowley.

Then came Turning, a concert art film made by underground hero Charles Atlas. And Swanlights, a book of her own art, accompanied by one of a series of challenging and symphonic records with the Johnsons. Cut the World, a live album, is stopped in its tracks after a single song by an eight-minute spoken word discourse called Future Feminism. She duetted with Björk, Marc Almond and Yoko Ono, and covered Neneh Cherry. She made herself publicly visible as transgender and changed her name and pronouns. Manta Ray, her collaboration with J. Ralph for the documentary Racing Extinction, earned her an Oscar nomination. At the crest of this cultural swell, Anohni released her first solo record. Hopelessness, from 2016, was a furious infiltration of 21st-century apocalypse pop (think Madonna’s 4 Minutes, Britney Spears’ Till the World Ends, Kesha’s Die Young) which burned the fog off those songs’ death disco and named names in the smoke: Obama, who jailed the transgender whistleblower Chelsea Manning for years before finally commuting her sentence. Capitalism, which alienates us from the natural world, and suicidally sells it for parts. All the generations of violent men.

Production by Daniel Lopatin and Hudson Mohawke tuned Anohni’s big ideas for big rooms, pitching up somewhere between Rihanna and Coil’s Horse Rotorvator. If the pop charts failed to rise to her challenge, if the Oscars failed to invite her to perform at their ceremony (prompting her to release a statement assuming the reason was her “singing a song about ecocide, and that might not sell advertising space”), and if by every possible measure the world was worsening – then perhaps it wasn’t a big surprise when, in 2017, she announced on Instagram that she was retiring.

Then that changed. As if going back to her roots, she made a pack of furious, goth-hued barnburners with Butler for Hercules and Love Affair’s outrageously underappreciated 2022 album In Amber. And this summer, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross returned Anohni to the warm, chamber-pop world of the Johnsons, with some added soul and psych courtesy of Amy Winehouse’s producer Jimmy Hogarth. Her voice, one of this world’s great resources, sounds unclenched in comparison to the snarl and sneer of Hopelessness. But her point of view remains unflinching.

A piece of her art on the inner sleeve of My Back… makes it clear: “It’s Time To Feel What’s Really Happening”, implores her unmistakable script. We must face the degradation of the environment and the dignity of its inhabitants. It’s about looking out and seeing these emergencies. But also, looking in. “It means reckoning with our past, our seats of privilege, who we have been, what our bodies are made of, what we have endured, what our ancestors did to others,” she says, “to inhale a longer idea about our relationship to family, homeland and society.”

She’s begun to examine the roots of her own voice. “I perhaps represent a third generation of what some might call a British ‘blue-eyed soul singer,’” she says, referencing the long British tradition of white singers interpreting Black R&B and soul music, which might be said to have begun with Dusty, Tom Jones and Kiki Dee. Anohni grew up of British and Irish stock, in Chichester, on the south coast; her father was an engineer and her mother, a photographer. At her grandmother’s house in Kingston, she first heard second-generation blue-eyed soul star Boy George singing Culture Club’s Do You Really Want to Hurt Me. “George was a punk, working class London Irish queen,” she says. “My identification with him was so strong that I figured if I was feminine likethis, then I was supposed to be a singer. I began to emulate his voice long before I understood its origins.” When she was ten, her father’s job relocated the family to California. Voices from back home followed her. British singers like Annie Lennox and Alison Moyet, she says, “affirmed me in my conviction that I had a right to feel. They taught me how to express that feeling with power, grace, and, when necessary, cunning. There wasn’t a popular tradition of ecstatic singing in Britain. Elizabeth Fraser is the only singer I can think of who really shook one’s spirit with her voice, and could bring joyful tears to your eyes.”

Anohni moved to New York City in 1990 to study experimental theatre at NYU and was turned on to Nina Simone and Otis Redding. “I began to sense a relationship between this music and the singers I grew up on, but I couldn’t articulate it at the time,” she says. “I never understood a voice as having moral authority until I heard Nina Simone. She was just telling the straight truth. By 1992, I was clinging to the balcony railings at Carnegie Hall, crying as I watched her sing. I never understood that listening to all this music and then writing my own songs might be a process of appropriation; I was ignorant to that concept. At that age, I had never allowed myself to consider that I might be a passive beneficiary of racism. I was wrapped up in my own struggles.”

These included the AIDS epidemic, felling queers and artists by the thousands. These included grim indications that the earth’s water and air were polluted beyond belief if not quite beyond repair; that nuclear war was possible; that much of the country she was living in, in the name of their god, considered queer and trans people as, at best, bedevilled. “I had fought bitterly for my belief that I should have the right to exist and express my feelings of being alive. These soul singers dignified that belief. I moved towards the voices that set me free.”