Hopelessness

When Anohni sings about mass graves and drone strikes, it doesn’t feel like a lecture. It can be strangely empowering. For all its bleakness, Hopelessness leaves you feeling anything but.

For so long, ANOHNI had felt like a supernatural force, of this world but able to see a thread of love and hope through all the sadness. By expressing the grimmest realities, that thread becomes harder and harder to find. But ANOHNI’s music makes that struggle all the more powerful.

An epic, potentially epoch-making release. [No. 131, p.53]

The message is encoded into every note: If Anohni's music can manifest into something new, then perhaps we can. There is risk involved with moving from a timeless sound towards one that attempts to capture a moment, but without risk art is worthless.

Throughout Hopelessness, Anohni reveals multiple layers to the stories within her songs, and that the deeper you dig beyond the headlines and easily digestible sound bites, the more pain and deception you are likely to find.

Hopelessness is her first album under her new name, and with that comes a new clarity and purpose to her songwriting, an ownership and authority over her artistic voice that we've not yet seen before.

Though it would still be a potent political statement, Hopelessness would be something of a joyless slog if the music weren’t so gorgeous, matching the intensity of the subject matter without overwhelming it and giving the appropriate space to ANOHNI’s voice, which remains a glorious instrument.

Even if I miss the personal struggles of I Am a Bird Now and The Crying Light, Anohni and her collaborators have created a dazzling musical artifact. Hopelessness ultimately betrays its title, and its banner-waving, because the voice at its center is fundamentally the opposite of defeated.

Compared with the morose, string-laden music Anohni is known for, this is an Ariana Grande album, but it remains experimental and emotional enough to feel natural. Anohni is broadening her audience--not courting a broad audience.

It’s clear Anohni did not reinvent the wheel with her music. What she did do was get the wheel to start spinning in another direction. With any luck, maybe she can convince society to follow her lead.

Anohni is at her very best when rawly cracking over glacial blasts of percussion.

In contrast to the neoclassical leanings of Antony and the Johnsons, Hoplelessness is about this particular moment and sounds very of the moment, thanks to beatmakers Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never. Combined with Anohni's trembling and vulnerable vibrato, its grandiose sounds crescendo into a sprawling political epic that could inspire spontaneous bursts of interpretive dance.

The subject matter, then, is unrelenting. But Anohni’s impassioned delivery succeeds in making ecstatic music out of it, carried along by propulsive soundbeds; music that is equal to the apocalypse.

Making relevant, accessible, uncringey protest music in this day and age is such a difficult task that most artists have decided not to bother. Anohni has been brave enough to take that risk, and the most vital album of recent times is the reward.

Though it is not articulated directly, the heart of this record is about the potential for a genuine and communal response to that hopelessness, and about an empowering, defiant joy that can be forged even in the depths of despair. Soundtrack to a soon unceasing summer.

The performances in these songs are as dramatic as they are musical: disarmingly direct, phenomenally compelling.

Unlike the haunting ambiguities that comprised the Johnsons oeuvre, Anohni doesn’t traffic in subtlety here; boldface subversiveness makes Hopelessness lethal.

A bitterly beautiful album.

Hopelessness sees Anohni take a harder radical line--her rich, red velvet voice set not in the pastoral piano landscapes of lauded past albums, but in the contemporary electronic stylings of two producers: Glasgow DJ Hundson Mohawke and his Warp label contemporary, Brooklyn's Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never. [Jun 2016, p.89]

Generous of spirit and cutting-edge sound, Hopelessness is a statement for our times, and one that will not be easy to dismiss. [Jun 2016, p.63]

Aside from dubstep-resembling "I Don’t Love You Anymore”, a breakup song that doesn’t really mesh within the political context of Hopelessness, there’s hardly any fault to find in Hegarty’s incredibly imaginative portrait of a world that’s in dire need of some reformation.

The songs with less specific and less contemporary references hit harder. [Jul 2016, p.46]

Hopelessness has occasional flaws. Not all the songs conclude satisfyingly, and some of the lyrics are vaguely trite. But despite them, it is a missive from an artist who has never ceased to evolve and now asserts herself with gusto and unflinching purpose.

What can at times sound facile in its un-coded repugnance deepens, on repeated listens, into both sophisticated political statement and haunting music.

It’s a strange album that is melodically approachable, but lyrically draining.

Hopelessness is an exercise in provocation. It’s anti-apathy, determined to stir thought, even if that’s total disgust and dejection.

Anohni's targets deserve all the fury she unleashes upon them, but that doesn't make this any easier to engage with, even if you agree with what Anohni has to say.

Good pop is often pliable, its message broad or ambiguous enough for listeners to flex it to their taste. Political pop can be like this without compromising its message, but most of Hopelessness has no interest in pliability. It regards its audience as either fervent believers in Anohni's cause or a pop mass in need of blunt polemic.