Anohni (or the artist formerly known as Antony Hegarty) has a once in a lifetime voice. It’s so rich and distinctive that one notices its absence – and indeed, it has been a long six years since the last Antony and the Johnsons record, Swanlights. In 2015 the winds of change began to pick up, as the Mercury Prize-winning singer/songwriter unveiled her new name – Anohni – and announced a new album was on the horizon.
Her voice still trembles, warbles and quivers under the emotional weight and density that comes with each song’s subject matter, however pianos and jazz drums have been replaced by thudding bass drops, whirring synthesizers and intricate, detailed beats. Anohni’s joined by producers Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, who both use their textured, outside-the-box approach to electronic production and arrangement to complement Anohni’s politically-charged misery (such as on Obama and the mesmerising Drone Bomb Me) and introspective decimation (see Why Did You Separate Me From the Earth and I Don’t Love You Anymore).
Helplessness is at once ice-cold and warmly intimate – it’s challenging, subversive and a new beginning for one of the most important singers to emerge in the last 15 years.
BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
