To listen to ANOHNI is, first and foremost, to experience a voice of unmistakable character. It’s a voice that can convey profound fragility and immense power, often within the same breath. A glance at a playlist of her work reveals a career of evolution, an artistic journey that moves from the deeply personal to the unflinchingly political, all while maintaining a core of radical vulnerability.
The early material, released as Antony & the Johnsons, established a unique musical world. Songs like “Hope There’s Someone” and “You Are My Sister” are built around lush arrangements of piano and strings, creating a sound that feels both classic and entirely new. This was the setting for songs of intense personal disclosure, exploring themes of gender identity in “For Today I Am A Boy,” longing for connection in “Cripple And The Starfish,” and the complex nature of love in “Fistful Of Love.” The music is intimate, as if you’re hearing confessions shared in confidence, yet the emotional scale feels grand and operatic.
Later came a jarring, brilliant shift with the 2016 album Hopelessness, released under the name ANOHNI. Here, she traded the orchestral arrangements for stark, powerful electronic production. This sonic change mirrored a thematic one: the focus turned outward. The intense vulnerability that characterized her earlier work was now directed at global crises. On “Drone Bomb Me,” she sings from the perspective of a girl wishing for death from the sky, and on “4 Degrees,” she confronts her own complicity in climate change. It was a confrontational and necessary evolution, proving that her emotional honesty could be a potent tool for political commentary.
This ability to inhabit different sonic and emotional spaces is also clear in her many collaborations and interpretations. On the playlist, we hear her voice providing the soaring, soulful center of Hercules & Love Affair’s house anthem “Blind,” and intertwining with Björk’s on the elemental duet “The Dull Flame Of Desire.” She can also take a well-known song, like Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” or Beyoncé’s “Crazy In Love,” and imbue it with a gravity that makes it feel entirely her own, stripping it down to its most sorrowful and honest core.
The recent return to the name ANOHNI and the Johnsons suggests a blending of these threads. Tracks like “It Must Change” and “Sliver of Ice” bring back the soulful, organic instrumentation of the Johnsons, but the perspective feels informed by the clear-eyed global awareness of the ANOHNI material. What remains constant across all of these projects is a profound empathy and a refusal to look away from difficult truths, whether they are found within the self or in the wider world. Her body of work isn’t just a collection of songs, but a continuous, courageous act of testimony.
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