Even for someone as emotionally potent as Anohni (aka Antony Hegarty), HOPELESSNESS stands as a high watermark for affecting music. An album that is as sonically adventurous as it is political, vitality spills from its every pore. This is a triumphant record — not so much a return to form as a return to purpose.
"As leader of the chamber pop ensemble Antony and the Johnsons for two decades, the musician formerly known as Antony Hegarty has always been in dialogue with the present. But now, with co-producers Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, there are many more layers of rigor to that conversation. Anohni has undergone a musical metamorphosis, crafting another outlet for her vision: the electronic dance anthem as visceral protest song. So much has unfolded in the six years since Anohni's last studio album with the Johnsons—Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the trial of Chelsea Manning, the Black Lives Matter movement. Anohni—ecofeminist soul warrior, dramatist, a person who Lou Reed called an "angel"—it would be hard to find a more capable figure to lead us into a woke pop polemic.
Poignant political realities have always grounded Anohni's work, but now they are at the forefront, articulated with an incisiveness that stares you in the eye. You have never heard words like "chemotherapy," "child molesters," and "mass graves" crooned so gorgeously. HOPELESSNESS places Anohni alongside radical pop provocateurs like M.I.A., artists who propose difficult questions that mainstream America does not want to ask because it would not know what to do with the answers. But Anohni insists that we raise our stakes." - Pitchfork