My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross

The scaffolding of ANOHNI’s voice across these 10 tracks is remarkable, and the way she excavates a deep, unrelenting love within them through accessible and awing prose is magnetic, thoughtful and intricate. From a lyrical place, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross enacts an exotic balance that is so rarely seen in contemporary music.

Riveting. .... The lucidity behind every message on My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is arresting, as it is drawing from a well of pure emotion that can be comprehended in full. [Jul 2023, p.48]

Theatrical and majestic, ANOHNI’s supple world-building acts as a mirror to her soul – ‘My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross’ may well be her masterpiece.

A stunning record. [Aug 2023, p.23]

It’s post-protest music, made stronger for refusing to endorse personal solutions to systemic problems.

My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, in turn, shows Anohni pivoting between stunningly direct and entrancingly oblique manifestos. A listener is left voyeuristically spellbound, striving to reconcile what they’ve encountered with the life they’re currently living.

The passion in ANOHNI’s voice lifts meandering mid-album cuts Can’t and Scapegoat. But the Marvin Gaye-indebted Why Am I Alive Now is the standout.

She has delivered a body of work where she has given herself the space to be resilient, vulnerable and inspiring.

The push and pull of passiveness and assertiveness on My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross feels organic at every turn. Sometimes the music can be a little too loose, careening like an out-of-control car (especially on the discordant “Go Ahead”), but the slackness is worth the freedom of hearing Anohni’s voice fly like the bird she became years ago.

A powerful return, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross reaffirms that Anohni & the Johnsons' ability to confront the hardest issues and moments is as eloquent and relevant as ever.

The instrumentation on My Back is gentle, self-conscious, and loose in structure while that on her earlier works is poised and intricate. This rawness doesn’t make it any less powerful; it intensifies the despondency haze that hangs in the air of each song like a yet-to-rain nimbus.

Although there are a couple of songs on this album which don’t set up camp in your memory, the vocals always astonish, from the sound of Jeff Buckley floating on a soul bisque on It Must Change to the greasy gospel crescendo of Rest.

My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross feels like a particularly powerful entry in her discography: surrounded by music that’s beautiful but relatively straightforward, that voice seems more extraordinary still.

It's a record of fierce seriousness, a demand for engagement as inescapable and immediate as somebody shaking you by the shoulders. [Aug 2023, p.82]

Expect to cry - then get fired up.

There are blasts of harshness (‘Go Ahead’’s fuzzed-out polemic, or ‘Scapegoat’’s bombastic crescendo) but ‘My Back Was A Bridge…’ is still, by some distance, the most accessible thing she’s ever made. Though much of its palette is drawn from ‘classic’ music of the past, however, the record’s brilliance lies in the way it doesn’t retreat from the present.