ANOHNI’s HOPELESSNESS was one of 2016’s undisputably great records, an adept merger of dance and protest music that could be both physically and spiritually moving. It landed on Paste’s list of 2016’s best albums and the list of that year’s Mercury Prize nominees for a reason.
Now ANOHNI is following up that stellar album with a new EP. PARADISE puts her back in collaboration with Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, who both helped to craft the abrasive but approachable sonic palette of HOPELESSNESS. That sound is back on the title track for PARADISE, which has ANOHNI telling of “mis-shifting beauty” as synths squelch and bass rumbles underneath her enrapturing vocals. “I feel giant and trapped,” she sings after one of the song’s more propulsive moments. All of the force and feeling of her past work is absolutely intact here.
PARADISE is out on March 17 through Secretly Canadian and Rough Trade. You can preorder the EP here, and check out its title track, tracklist and album art below, as well as a statement from ANOHNI about the record.
Paradise Tracklist:
01. In My Dreams
02. Paradise
03. Jesus Will Kill You
04. You Are My Enemy
05. Ricochet
06. She Doesn’t Mourn Her Loss
ANOHNI’s Artist Statement:
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.”