Album Review: Anohni - Hopelessness

Anohni's — formerly known as Antony (Hegarty) — surprising new album jettisons the sweet orchestrations of The Johnsons.

The delicate chamber pop melancholia has been replaced with dark brooding electronica from the laptops of Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke. As the title suggests, Anohni takes us on a bleak downward spiral that artfully juxtaposes the personal and the political without obviously veering into protest. The recent single Drone Bomb Me has been described as a death wish of someone who's watched their family killed by a drone bomb, but it rather duplicitously seems to work as a love song that has the same darkly violent intentions of Cripple & The Starfish. 4 Degrees calls out an addiction to fossil fuels and is prepared to suffer the consequences till every last drop is combusted, taking the environment with it.

It's from here that she starts dealing deeply personal responses to war and politics. This album starts to characterise dark and troubled times in a way that most other artists simply avoid. Daddy observes our every move on Watch Me. The blue eyed soul of Execution wistfully sings of the governments that punish with death while Crisis confronts the sickening kind of war-torn violence we see on the news on a personal not political front. Once a supporter, the dirge like Obama sees Anohni feeling duped and angry. Everything leads to the title track where destructive sleepwalking passivity is held to account.

Is it really a case of hopelessness, or are we just plain hopeless?