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Music

Can We Stop For a Moment, And Talk About This Anohni Performance?

The artist was up for ‘Album of the Year’ at last night's Mercury Awards.

​(Photography by JMEnternational​)

Yes, yes, I know you lot are gassed about Skepta winning that £25,000 Mercury Prize last night – so are we, just look his face​. But now we've had a moment to calm down and digest, let's take a look at something else that happened at last night's award ceremony: this Anohni performance, for her spine-tingling track "Drone Bomb Me", taken off her album Hopelessness, which was also up for 'Album of the Year'.

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Anohni herself didn't take to the stage, and instead drafted in a woman with chalky face paint and fake blood splattered across her face, who mimed all the words beneath white shards of light. After the song was over, a woman appeared on the screen behind her and said, "We are wondering what is happening to the world. Everything is changing each day. You wake up in the morning and wonder, is it going to get better? Or getting worse? Everything is going upside down. How are we going to stop and work together and make the world a better place to live? All of us."

Anohni has previously said of the track, "It's a love song from the perspective of a girl in Afghanistan, say a 9-year-old girl whose family's been killed by a drone bomb…she is kind of looking up at the sky and she's gotten herself to a place where she just wants to be killed by a drone bomb too."​

Watch below: