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In Top Gun: Maverick, the big Tom Cruise blockbuster of 2022, the enemy was purposefully obscure—a villainous but unspecified nation ready to be outdone by our hero’s guts and derring-do without alienating any overseas theatergoers. That film was designed as a cinematic high five, a much-needed dose of big-screen optimism for viewers returning to theaters as the pandemic receded. Now, a little more than a year later, comes Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, the latest edition of Cruise’s other big franchise. Once again, he’s squaring off with a faceless villain, but rather than staging a new cold war, the film has shifted its focus toward a more modern apocalypse, lending a shocking jolt of relevance to a series that should be gasping for ideas nearly 30 years into its run.

In the Mission: Impossible films, Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, a secret agent of uncommon athleticism and galaxy-size overconfidence who never saw a brewing nuclear crisis he couldn’t fight off with a combination of funny masks and Cirque du Soleil–level stunt work. Though the series, based on the 1960s TV show, has been ongoing since 1996, it somehow reached new heights with 2018’s Fallout, defying the age-related gravity that eventually brings even the biggest names back down to Earth. (See: Indiana Jones.) As the 61-year-old Cruise’s career races on with no sign of slowing down, each new movie feels like a manifesto on the importance of his continued existence. Dead Reckoning Part One is yet another, pitting Ethan against an all-powerful artificial intelligence that has no personality, no soul, and, most important, absolutely no star power. This is the future that old Hollywood fears, one in which computers make every decision. The running, jumping, deeply analog Ethan is the perfect man to stop it—right?

Pretty much. Dead Reckoning Part One is another swaggering delight in the series, with director Christopher McQuarrie yet again finding some actual narrative grist in the continued adventures of the world’s silliest superspy. In having Ethan do battle with a ruthless AI dubbed “the Entity,” which wants to control the world’s governments, the film holds him up as an exemplar of humanity—a bold gambit, perhaps, given that Cruise is one of our strangest celebrities, but one the Mission: Impossible movies have been nudging forward for quite a while now. Someone like James Bond might be the best at what he does, but he’s still an extension of the state, and ultimately a ruthless person as a result. Hunt is technically part of America’s intelligence apparatus, but he rejects any notion of “the greater good,” instead stretching reality however he can to save everyone around him and the world at the same time.

Surrounding Ethan is his usual gaggle of pals: the tech guys Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), and the multitalented British spy Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). The big additions to the mix are two more femmes fatales, an expert pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell) and an assassin named Paris (Pom Klementieff). And though our villain is nothing more than a glowing sphere that lives in the cloud, it does have a human emissary of sorts, the seething terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales, sporting a perfectly cropped salt-and-pepper beard). All of them are hunting for a set of special keys that will do … something to the Entity; as is usual for Mission: Impossible, the details are pretty unimportant.

[Read: What Mission: Impossible understands about Tom Cruise]

Still, fans of McQuarrie’s high-energy approach in the series’ prior two films might be surprised at the extent to which this entry remembers the other side of spycraft. There’s a lot of double-crossing and murky alliance-making, evoking the twisty espionage of Brian De Palma’s first Mission: Impossible, way back in 1996; to underline it, the nervy character actor Henry Czerny returns as Eugene Kittridge, now the CIA chief, who hasn’t appeared since that 1996 installment. He’s there largely to highlight the ongoing absurdity of Hunt’s “Impossible Mission Force,” the quasi-governmental agency that somehow exists alongside America’s regular intelligence apparatus and recruits agents who are better at close-up magic than they are at hand-to-hand combat.

Though the computerized Entity is the main villain, Kittridge represents an element that’s just as important in these movies: the stuffed shirt who sputters impotently as Ethan and his friends defy all logic on their way to saving the day. Dead Reckoning Part One still has plenty of wild stunts—like Ethan riding a motorcycle off a mountain, and doing martial arts atop the Orient Express—but there’s more than a hint of melancholy in between all the action, and a hint of worry that maybe the good times can’t last forever in the face of all this bureaucratic, algorithmic thought. Given that this is a Part One, the film’s conclusion is inevitably less satisfying than a proper third act, but this is a worthy entry in America’s best ongoing franchise, one where sincerity and absurdity walk hand in hand with vital, triumphant conviction.

One of the most uncompromising artists of the 21st century, Anohni Hegarty makes gorgeous music to warn humankind of its demise. Whether with gentle orchestration on the classic 2005 album I Am a Bird Now or with electronic beats on the 2016 release Hopelessness, her quavering voice has prophesied the death of herself, our species, and our planet with haunting, almost paralyzing, clarity. A writer of manifestos who can boast of an Oscar nomination and a spot on Rolling Stone’s list of the top 200 singers of all time, she commands a sense of gravitas more common to Nobel laureates than working musicians.  

Now, on her band’s new album, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, she explicitly situates herself within the American protest-music tradition. The songs’ shuffling rhythms and searching refrains recall Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, and other singers of the civil-rights struggle. Some of the lyrics, such as the one that titles the opening track, “It Must Change,” could be slogans chanted at a march. The album cover is a photo of Marsha P. Johnson, the activist who helped consolidate the queer liberation movement and inspired the name of Anohni’s band, the Johnsons. (Her image is, among other things, a reminder that Anohni has been singing about her own transgender identity since long before trans rights were a mainstream concern.)

Although lovely, these new songs still have a gruesome honesty. “Scapegoat” envisions a hate crime from the point of view of the criminal: “I can use you like a toilet / I can punch you / And take all of my hate / Into your body.” On “Why Am I Alive Now?,” she paints an all-too-recognizable hellscape of smoky skies and dying animals, lamenting, “I don’t want to be witness.” What course of action are these bleak visions meant to inspire? I wanted to speak with her to understand.

As it turns out, interviewing Anohni was as intense an experience as listening to her music. After she greeted me in a giggly and friendly manner, her speech turned halting. Each answer was painstakingly produced and employed custom terminology: Musical styles were “technology”; tolerance was the “mandate of care.” She repeatedly paused and asked to revise her thoughts, and at times seemed to be speaking through tears. At the end of the conversation, the spell broke and she was back to conviviality. “Sorry if I got a little—I don’t know what I got,” she said before we ended the call. I felt drained but reassured: Within this viscerally fearful music lies a rigorous theory of how we all might survive.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Spencer Kornhaber: Is the title of “It Must Change” a command, telling people to change? Or is it a statement of fact: Inevitably, things change.

Anohni: It was a feeling in me. It’s forcing a space in one’s imagination to exist. I watched society go from the ’90s, where people were in denial about the gravity of environmental changes that we were already experiencing, to within 10 years just having this resigned attitude about it. That space in our imaginations—why was it suffocated?

It’s probably partly because people feel so disempowered. We’ve all been forced into these complicitous stress positions in relationship to consumerism, where it’s impossible to even eat food without doing harm. It’s hard, when we’re facing so much shame and guilt about our own complicity as consumers, to imagine broader change.

Kornhaber: Your last album was Hopelessness, and it sat in that feeling of hopelessness. The vibe this time is a little different. Does that reflect you gaining hope or just changing how you’re expressing yourself?

Anohni: Hopelessness was probably the most strategically executed record I made. I set out to disrupt people’s assumptions about what my voice was for. It was no longer a voice of solace or comfort. I wanted to embody complicated conversations about my own complicity.

But what was interesting about Hopelessness is that as much as I thought I was doing this battle cry, attempting to break down denial, the people who cared were people that felt the same way I did but appreciated someone singing their thoughts. It’s nice to hear someone sing “I don’t want to be a part of this drone bombing campaign that’s taking the lives in a part of the world that I don’t even understand.”

Singing is a different channel of communication. It comes from the spirit. It’s ancient, and it bypasses a lot of bullshit. When you put really direct, clear words or ideas onto those streams of sound, they can reach into a different part of you. I mean, that’s what Marvin Gaye did with What’s Going On. He took all that technology of music and then he weaponized it with a plain-speaking script describing life as he saw it. It wasn’t just one song. It was an accumulation of songs that systematically identified issue after issue. And it culminated in a single vision that comprised a worldview. It’s powerful.

And ironically, for all the people saying Hopelessness is so hopeless, my desire was to use more vigorous language to talk about how I actually felt. The music I was making was too pastoral. It wasn’t responding to the times. It wasn’t sufficiently vigorous. And that was why I did Hopelessness. It wasn’t me going off and dillydallying with classical musicians.

[Read: Drones, global warming, and other excellent topics for pop songs]

Kornhaber: Where does this new album land in relation to that feeling?

Anohni: This record came about as an impulse. I contacted my label during COVID and said, “I’d like to make a ‘blue-eyed soul’ record.” Blue-eyed soul is obviously a very complicated, problematic idea. And yet, it’s all wrapped up in the truth about where my voice comes from.

Why, as a 10-year-old, was I listening to New Wave singers like Boy George and Alison Moyet, who were singing with these intensely soulful, evocative voices in American accents? I was sitting by the radio as a child in the South of England hearing these vocalists express a kind of knowledge that I didn’t see in evidence anywhere else in the society that I was part of. Here was this oasis of gracious resilience, embodied in the form of a 20-year-old Irish London queen named Boy George, singing like a 50-year-old Black, American woman. It was the beginning of an outpouring of white, English voices that were founded on the soulful technology of Black, American music from the ’50s and ’60s. The British kids grabbed it like a life raft, and I find myself wondering why.

The class system in the U.K. was a guillotine. And I’m imagining kids from the suburbs of London going to see concerts by Otis Redding or sitting around listening to Nina Simone. It’s like an enlightenment. Children hear these voices that are expressing a knowledge of how to navigate untenable circumstances with grace, resilience, and joy. And their fucking minds are blown. That technology was taken up and imitated across generations.

Kornhaber: As you said, this is such a tricky and problematic tradition. How do you reckon with the appropriation discourse?

Anohni: I am from a naive generation. I mean, Culture Club: Boy George was an effeminate queen in Liz Taylor makeup wearing Hasidic outfits—with a bassist descended from the islands, a Jewish drummer, and a white guy with blond hair on guitar—singing with the voice of, like, Millie Jackson. It’s like, what is that? To me, that’s cultural biodiversity. Now we would call it a naive vision of multiculturalism as urban paradise. And that was what I was raised on. We would go to the city hoping to see everyone who was different, and that was where I felt safe. Because if everyone was different, then I was normal.

The whole conversation about appropriation—it’s real. It’s all real. And the first part of it is: Let me name where I come from. There’s no way for me to justify it. I’m just trying to be honest about where my voice technology comes from. And also say “thank you,” because this technology saved my life.

Kornhaber: This reminds me of the Marsha P. Johnson album cover. On Instagram, you wrote about how in the past six years, she has finally been recognized “as the Rosa Parks of the trans and gay Civil rights movements.” Why do you think this recognition has arrived in the past six years?

Anohni: Because there’s a Netflix movie.

Kornhaber: It’s as simple as that?

Anohni: Yeah, it’s as simple as that.

Kornhaber: Do you think that instances of cultural representation of queer and trans people make a substantive difference? Does it matter to you that there has been a trans singer on the American pop charts?

Anohni: Of course it matters to me. I’m thrilled that there’s a trans singer in the pop charts, but it has very little bearing on the safety of normal people’s lives, or whether they’re being preyed upon in the media, in the schoolyard, or in their places of work, or whether they’re even allowed to get jobs.

Representation is useful, but the mandate of care waxes and wanes depending on the conditions that societies are undergoing. There could have been times in the ’70s where gay people were a lot safer, generally speaking, than they are now. It’s not like this inexorable progress. That’s a fantasy. Things can get worse, and they do, and just because there’s a trans pop star doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be coming with pitchforks.

And that’s what people are being incited to do—by people that don’t give a shit about trans people. All they care about doing is making sure that no one gets themselves together to have a broader conversation about the fact that malevolent figures are making decisions that are operating like ushers of death into all of our communities. They don’t want us to have that conversation, and that’s why they’ve reanimated a loathing for gay people and trans people, and miraculously managed to reinvigorate a fantasy that women shouldn’t have a right to govern their own bodies. It’s a disease. We’re unwell. And that’s actually a message of hope.

Kornhaber: How so?

Anohni: Because if we can’t acknowledge what’s really happening, we’re never, ever gonna be able to shift our trajectory. The difference between this record and the last record is that I’m trying to introduce, in my own life, a sense of mercy and self-forgiveness in this conversation about complicity. We’re gonna need some tenderness if we’re going to be able to withstand the truth about who we are, and what we’ve done, and where we’re headed. We’re going to have to find ways to forgive ourselves.

But that’s a very adult challenge. And most of us are floundering in infantile, reactionary responses to the current moment. The adult response will be to find gracious strength and resilience—the same kind of strength and resilience that I saw modeled in those soul songs.

Kornhaber: The song “Why Am I Alive Now?” makes me wonder whether there are other eras that you wish you had been in, or that you escape to in your mind.

Anohni: In my way of dreaming about things, all the different eyes of the past are looking through our eyes. And I imagine that if I dream deeply enough, I’ll be able to hear the thoughts of coral reefs that I was once a part of.

There’s a tremendous amount of suffering right now on the planet. We’ve managed to keep it out of sight as, quote, “first world” consumers, but you don’t have to dig very deep to imagine the hurting hands through which most of the nourishment we suck on has passed through. Like foods, or animal products, or plastic wrappings. So “Why Am I Alive Now?” is just asking a question from a place of porous sensitivity to a broader condition of hurting that permeates the material world. How did it come to be that this was the window through which my eyes would shine? And how do I manage it?

The thing about “Why Am I Alive Now?” that I love is that the music is very joyful and abundant and complex. Hopelessness isn’t a fact. Hope isn’t a fact. It’s just a feeling. And so there’s this narrative, the human narrative, that’s preoccupied with suffering, and then there’s this environment that’s still in process. That’s a big part of the structure of the song, the message of that song.

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