ANOHNI announces My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, a new album by ANOHNI and the Johnsons, out July 7th on Secretly Canadian and Rough Trade, and presents its lead single/video, “It Must Change.” The British-born, New York-based ANOHNI describes the creative process for My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, her first album since 2016’s “HOPELESSNESS”, as painstaking, yet also inspired, joyful, and intimate, a renewal and a renaming of her response to the world as she sees it. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. That was a really important touchstone in my mind,” says ANOHNI of her forthcoming album. “Some of these songs respond to global and environmental concerns first voiced in popular music over 50 years ago.”

In 2022, ANOHNI began working with noted soul producer Jimmy Hogarth (Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Tina Turner). Having always composed and produced previous Johnsons records, this kind of collaboration was a first for ANOHNI. ANOHNI brought in notebooks full of lyrical ideas, and together they sketched out a series of demos with Hogarth playing guitar and ANOHNI on piano. Hogarth then assembled a studio band — including Leo Abrahams, Chris Vatalaro, Sam Dixon and string arranger Rob Moose — to record the full album. Hogarth’s intuitive guitar leads the listener across ten songs, touching on elements of American soul, British folk and experimental music. There is tenderness and instrumental brutality; melody and dissonance.

On “It Must Change,” ANOHNI soulfully describes systems in collapse with a note of compassion for humanity: “The truth is I always thought you were beautiful in your own way/That’s why this is so sad.” ANOHNI’s voice is sensual and smoothed, selectively reaching to the edges of what it can contain. “We’re not getting out of here/No one’s getting out of here/This is our world,” she murmurs. Elsewhere, “You know how they always said that light was the opposite of darkness?/It’s just fire in darkness, creating life/So those opposites, they don’t exist/It’s just an idea that someone told you.” The video, starring British social justice activist Munroe Bergdorf, is directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.

ANOHNI comments, “Munroe Bergdorf has done so much service for British society. She always impresses me with her articulate grace. Munroe’s dignity and ethical courage are a guiding light.”

ANOHNI
My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross
Tracklist
Secretly Canadian/Rough Trade records

1. It Must Change
2. Go Ahead
3. Sliver Of Ice
4. Can’t
5. Scapegoat
6. It’s My Fault
7. Rest
8. There Wasn’t Enough
9. Why Am I Alive Now?
10. You Be Free

Pre-order My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross by ANHONI HERE