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ANOHNI’s Hopelessness is an album built around change. A new name (the name she has gone by with friends and family for some time) in place of Antony, which was attached to her previous five albums with the now-absent Johnsons. A new sound and new collaborators in Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, each considered to be at the cutting edge of electronic music. Maybe most notably, a new approach to protest music—an approach which has proven divisive.

 

The album’s first three songs—detailing a stated desire to be drone bombed, to witness and participate in the destruction of the Earth, and a consent to constant surveillance—set up the conceit which undergirds Anohni’s new lyrical approach. This upturning of the traditional notion of a protest lyric, oscillating between the identities of active perpetrator, willing victim, and passive collaborator, proves truly revolutionary. With “Millennials” overtaking Baby Boomers as the US’s largest living generation, it seems the protest song has reached its logical denouement at the right time; shorn of cloying sincerity or unironicised ideological conviction, but with a renewed relevance and integrity.

 

The lyrical conceit is unsustainable, however. At the album’s centre, the songs Obama and Violent Men encapsulate Anohni’s uncontainable jeremiad. The former track, being both the album’s most straightforwardly judgemental and least tuneful, calls into question Anohni’s previous tactic of aural gratification. Sliding up and down a pentagon of its own in the form of five adjacent semitones, hovering around a tritone above the song’s scant harmony, it begs to be skipped. Should such songs be pleasurable or danceable, easily marrying their pop commodity existence with their message? Is the possibility of squeezing pleasure from the artistic rendering of naked physical pain to be desired? In this case the answer seems to be no. With the ambiguity concerning identity and agency apparent in the opening tracks done away with, there remains little to be gained from these proclamations.

 

Towards the end of the album, the issue of collective guilt that runs throughout comes to a sort of resolution, on Crisis. Anohni’s hypothetical interrogative “if I killed your father/mother/children with a drone bomb, how would you feel?” becomes a more gnomic “if I tortured your brother in Guantanamo, I’m sorry”. One senses Anohni is not merely embodying a contemporary Western sense of guilt, but consummating a kind of spatio-temporal simultaneity. Mirrored in the album’s immobile harmony and song structure, is a sense of timelessness in which horrors past, present, and future are forever occurring, with each of us as both victim and perpetrator.

 

With Auschwitz having recently been represented for cinema-goers entertainment in 3-D in X-Men: Apocalypse, Anohni’s shocking yet unlurid, humane confrontation with what is happening around her—what has always been happening around all of us—is to be applauded. And to be danced, with rage, to.

 

ANOHNI and Protest Music Spotify Playlist:

 

https://open.spotify.com/user/1156301067/playlist/4Xs5xmPAchLOicGTCmNxcf

 

ANOHNI’s Inspirations for HOPELESSNESS:

 

https://open.spotify.com/user/anohni/playlist/3ycezAIYeC34agMLc1VDby