In 2016, Anohni’s Hopelessness set scintillating, liquid gold electronics to despairing lyrics about the state of the world: the bellicose, but string-gilded stomp of the environmental crisis track “4 Degrees,” the seductive anti-NSA track, tantalizing the department she refers to as “Daddy” to “watch [her] watching pornography/watch [her] medical history,” the gamboling track about the death penalty, in which she declares “Execution/It’s an American dream.” Now, Anohni has announced a follow-up EP to that album, Paradise, and shared the title track.
For the EP — a collection of new tracks, some of which Anohni has been performing in her Hopelessness concerts — she again teams up with Hudson Mohawk and Oneohtrix Point Never.
The EP includes “Jesus Will Kill You,” on which she — as described in a press release — “curses Christian corporates with the knowledge that one day their God will punish them for their crimes against humanity and nature, destroying their comfortable, insular lives.” On “You Are My Enemy,” she examines motherhood through “rage and heartbreak.” “Ricochet” is a rebellion against an “omnipotent deity.” And on “She Doesn’t Mourn Her Loss,” she speaks of how humanity, and not the earth, “will grieve the loss of the biodiverse world that gave rise to us.”
Anohni also released a statement to accompany the announcement of the album:
“My Mother’s Love Her gentle touch My Father’s Hands Rest on my Throat”
Our new leaders hope to crush our spirits and expedite ecocide in the name of virulent progress, consumerism and false security. Like Jihadis, many capitalists and Christians compulsively seek to facilitate a righteous “holy war”, or apocalypse. For millennia, Men have enslaved women and attempted to appropriate female creative power, re-casting themselves as gods and creators. This assault continues today in the forms of ruthless wealth and mineral extraction, genetic engineering, mass surveillance and war mongering. But as Donald Trump and his cabinet now demonstrate, the skills encouraged in men by their biologies and the tools that boys master in the playground have not equipped them to deal with the unprecedented global crisis we are now facing. Mothers, your sons are trapped in a nightmare; they are not capable of responsibly negotiating the destructive agency that they now wield. More profound even than a crime against humanity, fathers and sons now compulsively prepare to commit ecocide, in a final and irreversible assault upon creation itself.Only an intervention by women around the world, with their innate knowledge of interdependency, deep listening, empathy and self-sacrifice, could possibly alter our species’ desperate course.” – ANOHNI, January 2017
“Paradise” itself begins with contorted chanting vocals, before the musician opens with her staccato declaration: “Paradise/World without end/Hopelessness/Sinks into the earth.” As with her Hopelessness tracks, it couples catchy, danceable songwriting with the darkest and most immediate contemplations. Listen to the track:
Here’s the EP art:
