The newest video from Anohni’s album Hopelessness accompanies the song of the same title, and is the first video from the album not to feature similar imagery of someone lip-syncing Anohni’s words (including Anohni herself, in her last video) against a minimal background, crying in close-up. (There is lip-syncing, but the video is more aestheticized and vaguely narrative than the others.)
It might be advised to watch it before you read the following if you care to draw your own conclusions about the imagery. But, for those who want it decoded a bit, the director of the video, Alexander Carver, gave his verbal interpretation…of his visual interpretation of the song:
Medieval barbarism and fascistic architecture haunt the fever dream of an anonymous corporate woman. Within the dream, distant past and distant futures are irrationally fused in a bizarre, iconic vision of martyrdom where animals are citizens and people are drones.
“How did I become/The mother of this son?” begins the track, with Anohni questioning one’s relationship to the destructiveness of humanity as a whole, until it swells to a chorus that asks the more pointed question: “How did I become a virus?” Anohni said of the track:
I am a human, a warm-blooded creature. I love the kaleidoscopic faces of life on earth. Yet my species is aggressively destroying biodiversity and poisoning the biosphere. It is hard to accept myself. I feel like I am behaving like a virus. I keep lying to myself in order to continue forward.
Watch the video: