It’s 10.30am, although Anohni isn’t keen on mornings. I know this because, when I ask how she likes to spend them, she tells me she’d much rather it be afternoon. She finds it hard to sleep. She drinks a lot of coffee, she says, her lilting voice – sometimes Irish, a bit American, a bit British – travelling through the phone from a hotel room in Camden, north London. In the background, I can hear the faint tap tap tap of a keyboard. Music briefly swims out of some laptop speakers, before being shut off. It’s been go-go-go since she got here from New York, where she usually lives. After our conversation, she says, she’s going back to the studio, to record some more, although she remains quiet about what it is she’s working on.

The 51-year-old musician, who first rose to prominence in 1990s New York, before making a name for herself as the singer of Antony and the Johnsons in the early 2000s, doesn’t do interviews very often. She’s withheld, maybe preferring to allow the music to speak for itself. And her music speaks loudly: In 2005, her band won a Mercury Prize for their album I Am a Bird Now. As a solo artist, her 2016 debut album Hopelessness was again nominated for a Mercury Prize. Over the years she’s become known for her distinct, soulful vocals and experimental prowess, an unwavering honesty and earnestness sitting at the centre of her work.

Anohni didn’t think she’d release another album following Hopelessness. And yet, six years later, here we are. My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, credited to Anohni and the Johnsons (an amalgamation of her name and prior band name, itself an homage to gay liberation activist Marsha P Johnson), arrived completely organically. What began as some initial studio sessions with co-producer Jimmy Hogarth (Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Tina Turner), slowly blossomed from a seed into a flower, and before she knew it, she was ringing up her label and telling them she would like to release another record, actually. The result is a gorgeously intimate yet expansive ten-track collection of soul and experimental folk music, with themes spanning the personal and the political: the earth’s destruction, our relationship to nature, how we collectively might begin to envision new ways of being, and becoming.

Anohni is intriguing on the phone: Gentle, intellectual, abstract in her expressions, often pausing before speaking, or backtracking, perhaps conscious that her words might be taken out of context or held up as some grand defining statement as opposed to something brash and off-the-cuff. She’s careful when speaking about anything personal, and becomes most animated when discussing big ideas and themes: technology, ecocide, finding tenderness and strength amid the ashes of a broken society. It makes sense: she’s been grappling and interrogating these subjects throughout her decades-long career. Her latest work is no exception. “We’re not getting out of here / No one’s getting out of here / This is our world,” she sings on album opener “It Must Change”, her distinctive vocals trembling over soft guitar and soaring strings.

Over the course of our phone conversation, we spoke about everything from getting older to the trappings of technology and the lessons found in nature.

You write a lot about the earth. When do you feel most connected to the earth?

Anohni: When I’m swimming in the ocean. I’m envisioning a spot where my family’s from, in Ireland. I like a lot of different oceans – I’ve been lucky to swim in a few of them.

When do you feel most connected to yourself?

Anohni: When I’m laughing. I do love a good scream, I love to scream with laughter.

Six years is a relatively long time between albums. What sort of shape have those six years taken?

Anohni: I’ve done a fair amount of studio work: painting, sculpture, video. I’ve been working on visual installations, things like that. It’s been quite an interior period for me. I wasn’t sure that I was going to do another record. I didn’t require it of myself. So it was nice to go fallow and see what came up, which is a bit of a risk, but I just went for it. This record was definitely a love child.

After the first couple of sessions [with Jimmy Hogarth], I knew I was going to make a record. Although I couldn’t quite visualise it. I was really quite scared to do it. Making the work was one thing, but releasing it was something that I wasn’t sure I wanted to do…

Why do you think that is? Was it the whole release cycle, everything that surrounds a record, etc?

Anohni: As I’ve gotten older I don’t necessarily feel like a duck to water with… well, it’s not intuitive to me to be centred in this way, publicly.

Interesting. As you’ve gotten older, how do you feel your approach to life has shifted more generally?

Anohni: I’ve noticed more acceptance. I think the worst thing in the entire world is regrets. I’m very anti-regrets. I think that most of us do the best we can, with the tools that we have in front of us. There are certainly things that I wish I hadn’t done, but I advocate for owning and embracing one’s story. You have to own your life.

Your last album was called Hopelessness. Without sounding too miserly, I feel as though the world feels more hopeless since that album’s release. What are your thoughts on that?

Anohni: At the time I always said that ‘hopelessness’ is a feeling, not an empirical diagnosis. It was important for me to say that was how I was feeling [then]. I don’t think that anything is necessarily any more hopeless per se than when I made that record… certainly the more terminal aspects of our cultural brokenness are more in our faces and more apparent now. So that’s going to create more intense feelings.

The question, for me, is: can we forge a space in our collective imagination to do something different? And that’s the most interesting challenge, in my mind, of our time. And beyond interesting – it’s epic. If we can’t imagine a future that’s sustainable, we won’t attain it. We’re encouraged in many insidious ways to resign ourselves to this fate that we’ve authored, and to feel powerless in the face of it. That’s the nature of the disease. Any athletic challenge is to swim against the tide.

“You see kids really going in very intersectionally now, in the way that they’re envisioning their activism. It’s very beautiful. It’s top-level beauty” – Anohni

You decided to include a portrait of Marsha P Johnson as your album cover. Can you speak a bit about why that was important?

Anohni: Her image has been a guiding star for me since I was beginning my adulthood. I named my group after her when I was 24, and walked under her name, in a way, my whole adult life. Her story and the myth of her life have been centred in public consciousness in a new way and I think I just wanted to circle it again, circle the things I value, circle the stories that I care about.

You said in a recent Guardian interview that ‘the UK is one of the birthplaces of loathing gender variance’. What did you mean by that?

Anohni: That Guardian interview was a bit off… The quotes weren’t super well-positioned. Loathing gender variance? That doesn’t sound like the way I would say something. I mean, it’s not rocket science. Maybe I’m just going to pass on that one today, my brain isn’t quite collecting it, I’m sorry…

That’s OK. I guess like you said, it’s not rocket science. Especially considering the past five years in the UK.

Anohni: I think a lot about legacies of ancestral trauma. I think that’s something that Britain has yet to really unpack, and how that’s impacted the psyche of the people. Things have become more polarised… which I think is in direct response to what we were talking about earlier; this emerging clarity. I think that’s forcing people into more polarising positions, depending on their ability to hold space for it. If it’s too crushing for people, they go back into denial and blame.

More recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about queer and trans people just choosing to leave the UK, full stop.

Anohni: That’s madness. You’re not the first person to say that to me, but I’m surprised to hear that being reiterated by a generation of people. I remember talking to Pussy Riot about the Trump administration and in a floundering moment I said ‘I just want to get out of the country’ and she was like, ‘You can't leave! This is where your work is!’ It was amazing to hear her say that because she’d just gotten out of prison!

But we have to care for ourselves, first and foremost. Different people can endure different levels of stress that cities and governments might put us in. I’ve been thinking a lot about mandates of care. I’m inspired by Adrienne Maree Brown and her writing. She’s been going more and more around this issue, of care as a prerequisite of evolution of societal wellness.

I think it’s sad when you say that people are leaving Britain because that suggests a dissolution of communities, which would be tragic. London especially is such an incredible place.

I feel like it’s become a lot harder to live here, in recent years…

Anohni: Yeah, everyone’s saying the same thing in America too. People are feeling electrocuted by stress. The stress is coming from computers more than, say, life. It’s making people sick. I’m not saying that computers are the generators of that stress, but the way we’re being forced to put our finger in the socket every single hour is just wrecking our nervous systems.

Maybe it’s about work infiltrating the home, and having to always be ‘on’.

Anohni: It’s relentless how the internet has restructured how we’re supposed to function. There are no human parameters around how much we’re supposed to absorb. It’s almost like an all-you-can-eat, crammed down your throat.

Honestly, the amount of information we’re forced to consume is so overwhelming that you can’t hold onto it, it’s like mist.

Anohni: But then the next challenge is: where is that adult within me that decides to set the parameters? It’s hard because all of these systems are set up with addiction models. Naomi Klein wrote this amazing article at the beginning of COVID about how the tech companies have been waiting for this moment to upstream and absorb giant swathes of civil life; our medical lives, our educational lives. It’s worked beautifully for them. It’s all very well to point fingers at these symptoms, but unless we deal with this stuff infrastructurally, it’s never going to shift.

My favourite song on this new album is ‘Rest’. Do you think rest can be a radical act?

Anohni: Adrienne Maree Brown would probably say ‘yes it is’. I think rest is important if you can grab it. I have a hard time with rest, myself. It’s hard to sleep. I drink too much coffee.

Me too. Another thing I love about this album was the way in which dark lyrics are paired with gentle, gorgeous compositions, which I thought was an interesting contradiction. Was that intentional?

Anohni: I think it’s about the landscape. I like it on ‘Why Am I Alive Now’ – I love how pretty and abundant the landscape still feels, and yet [there is] this expression of loneliness within it. But for me, the meaning of the work is the combination, not just the articulation but the environment that contains it. For me as an artist, that’s what I’m interested in.

Did you see that Just Stop Oil disrupted the Pride parade in London last month? It actually reminded me of something you’ve said in the past: ‘The subjugation of women [or in this case, queer people] and of the earth are one and the same.’ Is that something you still stand by?

Anohni: Oh my God, utterly. That’s what could be written on my gravestone. I do think there’s a wonderful opportunity for queer-bodied, trans and gay people to become soldiers of the earth. I’ve said it a lot but there’s an aspect of wilderness to any queer or trans identity because it emerges despite the insistence that it not emerge. What could be more natural than that? Nature itself insists on our existence. How society manages our presence waxes and wanes, but we’ll keep coming. We’re part of her dream of humanity. We’re part of her expression, her vision, the fact that she relentlessly insists that we continue to emerge is a very beautiful kind of affirmation. We are part of nature.

And I think that [idea has] been taken up, all over the place. You see it a lot with the younger generation of queer activists. You see kids really going in very intersectionally now, in the way that they’re envisioning their activism. It’s very beautiful. It’s top-level beauty.

My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is out now

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