British Social Justice Activist Munroe Bergdorf Stars in Music Video for Anohni’s 'It Must Change'

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.

Iain and Jane 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.

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.”

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 explains: “Many of the recordings on this record — like ‘It Must Change’ and ‘Can’t’ — capture the first and only time I have sung those songs through. There’s a magic when you suddenly place words you have been thinking about for a long time into melody. A neural system awakens. It isn’t personal and yet is so personal. Things connect and come alive.”

A portrait of trans/gay rights activist Marsha P. Johnson, taken by Alvin Baltrop in the 1970s, is featured on the cover of My Back Was a Bridge For You To Cross, reflecting a 25-year relationship with the memory of Johnson that ANOHNI has held space for in the presentation of her own work. ANOHNI’s approach since her last record has shifted, moving from someone tasked with challenging global denial to an artist seeking to support others on the front lines. “I want the record to be useful. I learned with HOPELESSNESS that I can provide a soundtrack that might fortify people in their work, in their activism, in their dreaming and decision-making. I can sing of an awareness that makes others feel less alone, people for whom the frank articulation of these frightening times is not a source of discomfort but a cause for identification and relief.”