In May 2016, just a few weeks after releasing her powerful record HOPELESSNESS, Anohni debuted an accompanying live performance at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. The cavernous drill hall amplified her thunderous production to prophetic heights, but the presentation was less a showcase of artistry than it was a persuasive address. Anohni herself stood shrouded in a veiled habit beneath a towering screen that showed an assortment of women mouthing along to her songs. Never once was she, nor her collaborators Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, and Christopher Elms, the center of attention. The point was clear: the words coming out of her mouth are so universal and enduring that they are greater than one individual.
Nine of the artists, poets, and activists featured in the Armory show reappear on the cover of Anohni’s newest seven-song EP, Paradise. They are shown weeping, drenched in blood, faces weary with pain. These are the people whose concerns Anohni works to vocalize, those who understand that womanhood and the Earth from which we subsist are deeply intertwined. “Only an intervention by women around the world,” Anohni writes in an accompanying piece, “With their innate knowledge of interdependency, deep listening, empathy, and self-sacrifice, could possibly alter our species’ desperate course.” The singer has spoken extensively about gender and ecocide as a member of the Future Feminism collective, but never before has she been so explicit about their cause-and-effect relationship. “My mother’s love/Her gentle touch/My father’s hand/Rest on my throat,” she sings on the title track, contrasting the feminine Earth with those who wish her harm. More than simply tossing around blame on Paradise, Anohni takes responsibility herself and urges her audience to do so as well.
Once again reunited with her production crew of Lopatin and Hudson Mohawke, Paradise comes off as a HOPELESSNESS companion piece rather than a stand-alone album. Even as her music grows increasingly industrial, the organic remains a constant presence, a subtle reminder that we carry the earth within us. Like a biodome filled with an assortment of ecosystems, Paradise jumps from rocky and volcanic to chirping and tropical with just the slightest change of beat, while each song sticks closely to its appointed terrain. On the furious title track, skittering percussion and booming production support Anohni as she describes apocalyptic loss and turmoil. “Staring at myself/I feel giant and trapped/Seemingly/Without escape,” she observes, inferring that the Earth’s destruction incites mortal dysmorphia. “I’m here, not here.”
The abrasive “Jesus Will Kill You” picks up where HOPELESSNESS’ “Obama” left off, a mournful interrogation of those who use their power to destroy the earth and its inhabitants. “Ricochet,” on the other hand, is a joyful, bouncing promise to “curse” and “hate” the creator for the state of existence. Both songs’ invocation of a punitive deity may seem sudden since Anohni tends to explore corporeal matters rather than the spiritual. But in the year since HOPELESSNESS, her rage and pain have transcended human action.
The final track, “She Doesn’t Mourn Her Loss,” also closed out the Armory show and was the most powerful moment of the evening. The song itself is a pleading ballad about how the Earth holds her tears and simply accepts change. “Who will remember her? If not her children,” Anohni asks. As it was at the Armory, the rhetorical question is again raised by a speech Aboriginal artist Ngalangka Nola Taylor originally presented at the World Economic Forum. “We are wondering what is happening to the world. Everything is change, changing,” she asks in broken English. “How are we going to stop and work on it and work together and make the world a better place to live for all of us?” Anohni provided one solution just days before the release of Paradise.
She revealed on Facebook that the EP contains a seventh bonus track called “I Never Stopped Loving You” that is available for a small price: “a gesture of anonymous vulnerability” communicated over email. By asking her audience to connect intimately in exchange for a piece of herself, Anohni presents a reminder that there is a human behind the materials we consume, just like there is an Earth from which we were born and from which we harm without thought. Paradise challenges its listeners to emotionally engage with their surroundings in hopes that they develop a conscious understanding that there are consequences to our daily conveniences. As Anohni continues her resistance, she recognizes the battle is impossible to win without an open heart.
