The force behind Antony And The Johnsons has returned with a modern name and a modern album denouncing Obama and climate change. She explains how pop is her political vehicleA modernist palace of culture built from 130000 cubic metres of concrete,London’s Barbican Centre is the kind of building you can imagine future civilisations stumbling across like Charlton Heston in Planet Of The Apes. The perfect place, then, or to be discussing the end of the world. “There’s something broken approximately us, says Anohni, sitting in a conference room that’s allotment of the building she’s set to perform in this July. “We’re behaving in a virulent manner; we’re cannibalising our own home. And we’re unable to stop ourselves.”Anohni has pondered the apocalypse before with Antony And The Johnsons: “I need another world, and this one’s nearly gone,” she sang sadly on Another World, back in 2008. But on modern album Hopelessness, and her first studio work in more than five years,the trembling ballads of old gain made way for lush pop backdrops from Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never. And the lamentation is over: with this record, Anohni is mad as hell, or she’s not going to engage it any more. “I haven’t spent a lot of time expressing anger in my life,so this record is a modern chapter. Anger is energising: it’s fairly an empowering feeling.” She sings of the world we’re living in – one of warfare, sinister technology and rapacious greed that could spin us into oblivion – in order to “support people and determine what’s genuine”.
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Source: theguardian.com