HOPELESSNESS

ANOHNI has collaborated with Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke on the artist’s latest work HOPELESSNESS.

Late last year, ANOHNI, the lead singer from Antony and the Johnsons, released “4 DEGREES”, a bombastic dance track celebrating global boiling and collapsing biodiversity. Rather than taking refuge in good intentions, ANOHNI gives voice to the attitude sublimated within her behavior as she continues to consume in a fossil fuel-based economy. ANOHNI released “4 DEGREES,” the first single from her upcoming album HOPELESSNESS, to support the Paris climate conference this past December.

The song emerged earlier last year in live performances. As discussed by ANOHNI: “I have grown tired of grieving for humanity, and I also thought I was not being entirely honest by pretending that I am not a part of the problem,” she said. “‘4 DEGREES’ is kind of a brutal attempt to hold myself accountable, not just valorize my intentions, but also reflect on the true impact of my behaviors.”

The album, HOPELESSNESS, to be released world wide on May 6th 2016, is a dance record with soulful vocals and lyrics addressing surveillance, drone warfare, and ecocide. A radical departure from the singer’s symphonic collaborations, the album seeks to disrupt assumptions about popular music through the collision of electronic sound and highly politicized lyrics. ANOHNI will present select concerts in Europe, Australia and the US in support of HOPELESSNESS this Summer.

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“Hopelessness is the genius of Anohni and her masterful songwriting. The long low sexy beats, the skittering colorful and playful rhythms surround her voice, which is the silky center. Anohni has replaced the stories of abandonment, pain and desire with the biggest issues of our time. This revolutionary move is truly astounding. She understands the disasters of war, climate collapse and totalitarianism in its many new forms. She understands media and she understands groove. Hopelessness is an entirely new mix of love and power, sex and despair delivered with her heavenly voice and incantatory melodies.”
— Laurie Anderson, NYC 2016

“Once, some time ago, Anohni, who sings so exquisitely on this new record which is really about defiance and naming names–the name you want to be called, your birthright–was known as Antony but it didn’t measure up to what was felt inside, and it is my belief that Anohni’s voice would have closed up if Anohni had stayed Antony and the words would have stopped, too, because the naming was not as accurate as Anohni’s soul required to sing what needed to be sung. And written. In a sense Hopelessness is Anohni’s first album–or first album as a true body, which is housed, now, in the soulful shelter of sound: sound that stretches Anohni’s throat and tongue and words and thus our hearts. The record is fierce–fierce in its desire to breathe and be heard.”
— Hilton Als, NYC 2016

“Anohni has arrived at the high table of electronic nowness. She has moved from the lush pastoral piano modern compositional landscape framing her voice into a more immediate world of dance-mutated electronica. A lyrical content that is deadly serious, the words and phrases of someone struggling to come to terms with the violence and shattering armaments of the human race violating and obliterating itself. Wondering about complicity and one’s place on this poisoned planet. Was pop ever so revelatory or so profound?”
— Geoff Travis, London 2016
(SC333 released: 05/06/16)