In Anohni’s performances of her new album Hopelessness, the musician barely appeared in the imagery on the screens behind her (other women would emotively lip-sync her song on those screens), and as an actual presence onstage, she was veiled so you never saw her face. The only time that she centralized her own image in her work — singing a series of songs about global crises and American warmongering — was in the song “I Don’t Love You Anymore.” That song’s video — which if I’m not mistaken, is also the footage used in the concerts — was released today.
The video is a single-take of Anohni in close-up lip-syncing the song with escalating vehemence. It’s notably the only song on the album that doesn’t speak specifically to a global issue — it could be read, even, as the album’s only personal song. (Thus the reason Anohni chose that as the track on which to actually appear.) But its narrative of disenchantment goes hand-in-hand with the rest of the work, and its vague lyrics could be just as much about “break[ing] up with America,” as Hua Hsu noted in his New Yorker review.
Watch the video: