Back in May, ANOHNI lit up New York's Park Avenue Armory with a special live rendition of her Mercury Prize-nominated 2016 record, Hopelessness, standing before projections of a number of female-identifying performers lip-synching to the songs. Early on Friday morning, she released a music video for album track "Crisis," featuring New York-based performer Storm Lever—one of the artists who appeared in the Armory presentation. If you ask us, it doesn't really get more moving than that moment when Lever starts crying at the end.In a press release for the video, Anohni discussed the song's lyrical references to the American military presence in the Middle East: "De-escalation cannot occur until we truly account for what the United States has done," she wrote. "I wanted to model what that might look like on a personal level as an American citizen. There is an unspoken sense that the atrocities our country has committed in the Middle East are too grave to really acknowledge or account for. And yet for peace to really take hold, there is no other road forward." Read our interview with ANOHNI here, and pick up a copy of Hopelessness via Secretly Canadian or Rough Trade.
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