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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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Francis Curzon, born in 1884 and later named the fifth Earl Howe, loved a souped-up Bugatti. And he loved to drive fast. He was famous for his “great skill and daring” on the racetrack, and also, eventually, for crashing into pedestrians—knocking down a boy in Belfast, Northern Ireland; slamming into a horse-drawn cart and killing a peasant in Pesaro, Italy.

These incidents (and 10 more) were recounted in a 1947 polemic by J. S. Dean, chair of the Pedestrians’ Association in England. Dean took particular issue with an assertion the earl had once made that the “recklessness” of pedestrians was the main safety problem on Britain’s roads. People who drive cars, Dean pointed out, do consider themselves to be “pedestrians” in other situations—that is, when they themselves are walking—and they agree that safety laws are important. Still, no matter what they may say, they continue to do whatever they want. Dean asked: “What are we to do with these people with their split minds?”

If the term had been available to him, he might have used the pejorative car brain to describe the conundrum he was observing. In the past five years or so, the term has become a common joke in left-leaning online spaces devoted to public transportation and urban planning, including the Facebook group “New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens.” Car brain also appears daily in the even more explicit Reddit forum r/fuckcars (404,000 members). It describes both a state of mind (“you’re car-brained”) and a type of person (“she is a car brain”). Obviously, the term is rude and very smug—in the same vein as the guys who wear One Less Car T-shirts while riding their bike. But there is also something true about it: Reason is failing in the face of the majestic automobile. People make excuses for cars and remain devoted to them, despite the incontrovertible evidence that they’re extremely dangerous.

This is an unresolvable tension of life in the United States. It’s been that way as long as there have been cars to drive and crash, and it’s especially notable now. An estimated 46,270 people were killed by cars last year. In 2019, deaths numbered 39,107. Car deaths drastically started to spike in 2020, a phenomenon that at first some ascribed to one of the many riddling consequences of the pandemic. Americans were driving much less than usual in the early days of COVID, but those who did take their cars out were found to be driving more recklessly and even faster than they were before, perhaps because everyone was simply more anxious, or perhaps because the roads were more open and people felt free to speed, or perhaps the threat of a deadly virus made other threats seem less consequential. Those explanations became less convincing, however, as pandemic restrictions faded yet car fatalities continued to rise. The number of people killed by cars in 2022 is 9 percent higher than in 2020.

[Read: We should all be more afraid of driving]

Of course, one problem with these numbers is the simple fact that cars are necessary. Americans have to get places, and in much of the country there is no other way to do that. Sometimes, becoming “car-brained” is just what you have to do to get through the day without constant dread. I grew up in a rural area, and was happily car-brained as I commuted to my job at the mall. Now I’ve been living in New York City for the better part of a decade and am rarely in a car. I find myself acutely terrified by the idea; I feel sharp, pit-in-the-stomach anxiety whenever a phone call to a family member produces the knowledge that they will soon be driving somewhere. Yet I still love cars. I plan imaginary road trips as I fall asleep. I sigh with envy when I see someone pull into a Wegmans parking lot. I used to have a red Hyundai Elantra; when I say Hyundai Elantra, I say it like I am saying the name of the one who got away.  

A new study attempts to model the confusion I’m feeling. Co-authored by Ian Walker, an environmental-psychology professor at Swansea University, in Wales, the preprint is titled “Motonormativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard.” It was based on survey data collected in the U.K., but nonetheless has some relevance: Walker and his team created pairs of questions designed to suss out the existence of a pro-car bias in society. The questions range from clever to somewhat chin-scratching. For instance, should people smoke cigarettes in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the smoke? Forty-eight percent of respondents strongly agreed that they should not. Should people drive cars in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the exhaust fumes? Only 4 percent strongly agreed that they should not. If you leave your car in the street and it gets stolen, is it your fault? Eighty-seven percent said no. If you leave anything else in the street and it gets stolen, is that your fault? Forty percent said yes.

Walker did not attempt to hide his bias. He was already familiar with the idea of car brain, he told me, and the term motonormativity was his “technical attempt” at expressing the same idea. “The harms of motoring are very much just seen as an aspect of life,” he said. “We’ve lost the ability to look at it objectively.” When I reasoned that some people in the U.S. have to drive, he suggested they could move—it’s not “as if we’re in Soviet Russia and the government allocates us to houses,” he protested. I pushed him on the survey questions; it makes more sense to leave a car in the street than it does $50. He countered that I was only proving his point. “That’s what streets are being used for at the moment, but I don’t think they’re intended to store property,” he said. “The paper is essentially suggesting that we make special pleading.” And that’s what I was doing: treating cars as an exceptional category.

Walker’s perspective may seem extreme, but there has been resistance to the “pro-car narrative” from the very beginning. In the first decades of the mass-produced automobile, but before the Eisenhower era of rapid-fire highway construction, screeds against cars were somewhat common. In 1931, The Atlantic published “Our Delightful Man Killer,” an impassioned essay about pending motor-safety regulations that emphasized the absurdity of the 33,000 fatalities counted the year before. (This number is even worse than it sounds, because the country’s population was about 123 million at the time, compared with 335 million today.) “The trouble lies deeper than in bad driving,” the essay concluded. “It lies in the fundamental incompatibility of machines and men, steel and flesh, in a running mix-up on the highways. Nothing on earth can make their intimacy safe.” A similar, gorier essay appeared in Reader’s Digest a few years later—this one suggesting that “if ghosts could be put to a useful purpose, every bad stretch of road in the United States would greet the oncoming motorist with groans and screams and the educational spectacle of ten or a dozen corpses, all sizes, sexes and ages, lying horribly still on the bloody grass.”

[Read: Car-rental companies are ruining EVs]

Almost 100 years later, the cognitive dissonance has become, if anything, more pronounced. Motor vehicles are a leading cause of death in the United States, according to the CDC. They’re in the top 10 for all age groups from 1 to 54 years old, Matthew Raifman, a researcher at the Boston University School of Public Health, pointed out when I reached him for comment. Many other top causes of death—cancer, heart disease—are talked about all the time as serious public-health problems that need radical solutions. “Why are we not doing that for motor vehicles?” Raifman asked. “It’s weird to me that we’re okay with this top-10 cause of death that’s sitting there year after year.”  

Some believe that new technology will help solve this problem. But as the first self-driving vehicles arrive on our roads, they’ve only underscored the hubris of car culture. Earlier this year, The New York Times’ Christopher Cox interviewed Tesla owners who had been in accidents caused directly by malfunctions of Tesla’s $15,000 Full Self-Driving feature, and found that many were willing to explain the car’s dramatic errors away. They weren’t skittish about getting back (as human observers) behind the (autonomous) wheel. One man was still using “Mad Max mode,” in which his Tesla would aggressively pass slower moving cars on the highway. Tesla did not respond to my requests for comment.

More recently, The Washington Post reported that Tesla’s autopilot features had been involved in at least 736 crashes since 2019, far more than had been previously known. While the meaning of the number is still obscured by some missing information about how Tesla’s software was being used and how it might have failed, what’s obvious is a surprising level of comfort with danger: In one crash described in the report, the driver had affixed small weights to his steering wheel to get around the system’s requirement that a human always be hands-on, ready to take over for the robot.

The strangeness of “car brain” will persist well into the future. Driving is dangerous. Driving is terrifying. Still, I want to be going 80 miles an hour through a desert. I want to turn a radio dial! I want to keep personal items in a glove compartment and hit the open road with a huge fountain soda. (Can I have next week off?) I’m lucky to be healthy and young—if suddenly I were to die, it’s statistically most likely that it would be because I was in a car crash. I know this. My car brain doesn’t.