The politically-charged Paradise EP acts as the accompaniment to last year’s poignant Hopelessness album – a politically charged, cathartic return for the artist formerly known as Antony & The Johnsons.

Hopelessness was an ironically titled album and Paradise – which finds the musician collaborate with Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never once more – is equally as tongue in cheek, depicting something far from paradise. In a statement with the EP’s announcement, Anohni declared: “For millennia, Men have enslaved women and attempted to appropriate female creative power, re-casting themselves as gods and creators… 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.”

Politics hold the grounding in the centre of Anohni’s 2017 work, much as they did on 2016’s album but this time around the finger is largely – and expectedly – pointed towards the blonde haired baboon in charge of US politics. If you were expecting the ‘punk’ in anti-Trump music to exist within guitar music as it did with Thatcher’s Britain and Bush’s America, you are wrong – Anohni is having a stab at it here and, bizarrely, with electronica but, in 2017, it all feels slightly more fitting.

The music produced by Hudson Mohawk and Oneohtrix exists more as a tapestry for Anohni’s words and charisma than anything else, so often though it highlights Anohni’s assaultive agenda. ‘Ricochet’ allows Anohni to break into huge club sounds with thumping bass cutting through her slating lyrics. No theme of debate in the modern day is left out of the attack either, this time with the gender identity being the subject: “For making me this way / Making me like this / A point of consciousness, my god.”

It is the title-track off the EP that is the real magnum opus of the six tracks. The electronics that swarm and unfold through Anohni’s voice sound mammoth – equally as poised and chaotic in how they attack. The jarring electronics do nothing to drown out Anohni’s lacerating lyrical jabs at masculinity either: “My mother's love / Her gentle touch / My father's hand / Rests on my throat”, a theme which continues into ‘Jesus Will Kill You’. The latter track never quite reaches up to the same electronic level that ‘Paradise’ poses but this does nothing to diminish the anger revealed in Anohni’s poetics: “Why you hurt me? / Why you make me so sick? / Why you take and take? / Even change the laws / You deregulate / Seek to destroy our homes / You’re a mean old man.” One guess at who that track is aimed at…

Musically, the EP isn’t always outstanding, a lot of these examples of electronica exist elsewhere in the musical landscape – they are slightly avant-garde features that set a claustrophobic, oppressive setting. Unlike Hopelessness though, you get the sense that this EP is more about what is being said than what is being heard. ‘You Are My Enemy’ is musically a little lacklustre, yet Anohni proves her point proven in the lyrics that detest the gender-driven world we live in. The opening and closing tracks on the EP – ‘In My Dreams’ and ‘She Doesn’t Mourn Her Loss’ – set ambient introductions and exits to lead you in and out of the debate that Anohni wants to address.

As an EP, the messages that Anohni delivers are vitally important and prove their worth in the current political conversation that we are all part of. They never back down or shy away from the point that she wants to make – even when the music appears to call it quits, the lyrics transcend the stumble. Anohni has perhaps turned the new leaf in what was punk, this one really means something.
Tom Churchill

Website: anohni.com
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Twitter: twitter.com/rebismusic