Anohni releases It Must Change starring Munroe Bergdorf

PRETTYBIRD creators Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have directed the music video for Anohni’s new track It Must Change, starring British social justice activist Munroe Bergdorf. 

It Must Change is taken from My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, the new Album by ANOHNI and the Johnsons, out July 7th On Rough Trade & Secretly Canadian.

Forsyth and Pollard are BAFTA-nominated filmmakers and multi-disciplinary artists who have worked together since meeting at Goldsmiths in the mid-nineties. They have worked with musicians including Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, St. Vincent, Gil Scott-Heron and Scott Walker.

Directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard commented: “Anohni is a visionary artist who speaks with compassion and intellect, from a place of experience. Bringing one of the most important voices of our time to life on screen has been both daunting and exhilarating. Munroe is the perfect conduit, not only for Anohni's voice, but for her message. It Must Change is a clarion call, pleading with us all to act on the urgent need for positive change in the way we live with one another and on this planet we call home.”

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 much-lauded 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 sixth studio album. “Some of these songs respond from the present day to global and environmental concerns first voiced in popular music over 50 years ago.”

My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is a record inextricably both personal and political, demonstrating music’s unique capacity to bring harmony to competing, sometimes contradictory, elements. “For me, there’s no heavenly respite; Creation is a spectral and feminine continuum, and our souls are an inalienable part of nature,” says ANOHNI. “As much as I was British or American, at moments I was identified as a non-viable part of any family, community, church, and society, on account of my femininity. I will always be grateful for that gift; it afforded me insight into the societies I found myself having to navigate, helping me to be more willing to look at who and where I really was.”

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. Bringing in notebooks full of lyrical ideas, ANOHNI and Hogarth 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. The album shape-shifts through a broad range of subject matter that summarize a world view. Through a personal lens, ANOHNI addresses loss of loved ones, inequality, alienation, acceptance, cruelty, ecocide, devastation wrought by Abrahamic theologies, Future Feminism, and the possibility that we might yet  transform our ways of thinking, our spiritual ideas, our societal structures, and our relationships with the rest of nature.