Anohni

Queer pop dominated 2023. At a time of escalating attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, including a wave of anti-trans laws and book bans, trans and queer artists continued to define and shape trends in music and culture.Some songwriters reflected the sorrow of the year with stirring protest songs and reflections on grief and loss. Others released club tracks that called for escapism on the dancefloor, and anthems that celebrated queer joy and sex. Fearmongering campaigns meant to dehumanize drag performers and non-binary people did…

The musician and visual artist Anohni was born in Chichester in 1971. She moved to California with her family aged 10 and to Manhattan in 1990 to study experimental theatre at NYU, getting involved in the New York performance scene and later forming Antony and the Johnsons. The band’s self-titled debut album came out in 2000 and their follow-up, I Am a Bird Now, won the Mercury prize in 2005. After a decade-long hiatus, during which she released solo work and was nominated for an Academy Award, the band have reformed as…

On her first album since 2016’s hollowed out electronic lament, Hopelessness, and the first using the “and the Johnsons” moniker in more than a decade, Anohni continues to soundtrack oppression, loss and alienation with heart-aching precision. The presentation has shifted, however: made with British producer Jimmy Hogarth (Duffy, Amy Winehouse), songs such as lead single It Must Change and Can’t add a soulful swagger to often brutally direct lyrics contemplating forgiveness for abuse and the sudden loss of a friend (“I…

You would be hard-pushed to call Anohni’s sixth studio album – her first since Hopelessness seven years ago – anything other than an unexpected departure. Whatever path you imagined her admirably peripatetic career might take next, it’s unlikely you pictured it involving a collaboration with Jimmy Hogarth, producer and songwriter for the likes of James Blunt. Anohni’s recent releases had shifted her ever further into the musical left field – or rather, back towards the left field from where she sprang, Anohni being, in…

In the summer of 1992, Anohni kissed the hand of Marsha P Johnson. Then 21, the British-born singer had moved to New York to study experimental theatre at New York University and was beginning to piece together her chosen family. “I quite idealised her,” Anohni says today of Johnson, the renowned activist who fought in the 1969 Stonewall uprising against anti-LGBTQ+ policing in New York, and spent her life at the vanguard of queer and transgender liberation. “A lot of her innovations were unprecedented.”Marsha P Johnson,…