ANOHNI possesses one of music’s most powerful voices, particularly when it comes to protecting the environment. In late 2015, the UK-born, New York City-based artist addressed the climate crisis head-on with “4 Degrees,” a paradoxically joyful synth-pop single from her debut solo album, HOPELESSNESS. Arriving as world leaders hashed out the landmark Paris climate agreement, “4 Degrees” refers to a projected increase in the Earth’s temperature (in Celsius) over the next century, which would devastate the planet’s ecology.

A bold work of both art and activism, the song remains resonant in a world that hasn’t gotten any more sustainable in the time since its release. Earth experienced its hottest year on record in 2015, with an average surface temperature 1.62 degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than the 20th-century average. And the following year was even hotter. Now 2020 is on track to be one of the five hottest years since record-keeping began in 1880.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, ANOHNI called us to reflect on the unfinished legacy of “4 Degrees” and offer an urgent call to action.

Pitchfork: Tell me about the genesis of “4 Degrees.” How was it inspired by climate science?

ANOHNI: I’ve been focused on the environment for my whole adult life. I probably wrote that song in 2014. There was a mounting sense of despair. I was observing this disparity between the culture and what was really happening with the planet. The freefall of biodiversity, the collapse of the oceans, the collapse of the forests. Make no mistake: We’re living through the end of nature as we’ve ever known it. And we facilitated that.

I started working with [UK producer] Hudson Mohawke, and he put forward these jubilant, anthemic tracks. The words just poured out of me. HOPELESSNESS was an opportunity for me to break from my own expectations of what I would produce, and create something more unsettling—and actually much closer to my true inner dialogue.

With “4 Degrees,” I was testing the limits of my own agency and trying to mount a full-frontal assault. In my late teens, I started using reverse psychology to disarm the listener and disrupt their normal way of processing a message. This record was a different version of the same process. I would say, “I want these things to happen. I want the animals to die. I want the ocean to boil. I want the creatures to burn in the trees. Bring it on. It’s my [sense of] agency.” This is the narrative of my behavior—not my intention, but my behavior.

I barely toured that album because I just couldn’t deal with the carbon footprint. Not to say that I won’t ever tour again, but it was just too painful.

What are the challenges of addressing the climate crisis in art?

It’s so complicated. We haven’t actually invented the language to describe the level of catastrophe that we are facilitating. The concept of eco-collapse is something we’ve never experienced as a species—not on this scale. And we are utilizing these weak-tea scientific words to try to talk about what’s happening, but those ideas aren’t landing with an increasingly manipulated, zombified, and cult-like general population, in the United States especially. So many people in America have been effectively convinced that science is just opinion.

I had to do a sonogram for my heart a couple of months ago. I saw my heart beating for the first time in my life, and I was shocked to see it so intimately, to see its movement and its delicacy, its relentless commitment to supporting my life. And yet I’d taken it for granted. I think most people around the world have that same relationship to nature. I think most people around the world don’t have any embodied understanding of the fact that their lives depend on the biosphere, that all of these things—the forest and ocean systems, the Arctic and Antarctic—are like the organs of the Earth and without them the body will die.

A lot of the songs on HOPELESSNESS were criticized for being naive and simplistic, but they were never designed to be a sophisticated conversation about this issue or that issue. They were designed as stealth assaults on denial. The idea was to crack my own denial, crack the denial of people around me, and find a new way into an atrophied conversation. I wanted to invigorate our awareness that we’re cutting the throat of our life source.

Are there any other artists singing about the environment in a way that seems resonant to you?

Marvin Gaye probably was the last time, in “What’s Going On.” And nothing’s changed, it’s just a hundred times worse. But that song is probably the most transcendent expression of where we’ve been at for decades now.

How will the current pandemic change things, if at all?

I don’t think it will change. I mean, well, it’s already changed. Just like 9/11. I stood on 6th Avenue and watched those towers fall. And in the days after 9/11, there was this peace in the city, almost benevolence. There wasn’t a feeling in the air that we needed revenge. And then in the months that followed, [Mayor] Giuliani and the president and the right wing harnessed this moment of vulnerability. They used it to pass the Patriot Act, and to start a long-sought-after war, and to dismantle privacy, and to radically increase America’s military interventions around the world.

With COVID-19, of course there are all these reports that the environment’s cleaning up. You can see China and Italy from space without any smog. The birds are coming back into the cities, the wild boar are running through the streets of Italy. But that’s an accident. That’s just because we were momentarily forced to de-monetize our spaces. It’s not like people are going to be like, “Oh, now we see a better way.” Because the fact is that Trump and his administration have been dismantling environmental protections just in the last few weeks. It’s the same kind of malevolent corporate sociopathy that characterized our response to 9/11.

I don’t believe that this momentary pause in production is going to affect our trajectory. This is no substitute for vocal commitment to save ourselves and our world. This is nothing like that. If anything, people think they’re accumulating environmental goodie points that they’re going to spend later.

What’s the best way that individual people can help with the climate crisis?

We’re so far beyond that. It’s so much worse than that. There’s nothing that you can do as an individual, except for fight with every fiber of your being to try to stop this. Especially if you’re thinking about reproducing, so you can look your children in the eye when they ask what you did for the last 30 years while Rome was burning. The scale of loss that we’re facing now, and we’re going to continue to face exponentially over the coming decades, is a loss that we’ve never witnessed as a species in our 300,000-year history on this Earth.

If you want to do something, you have to be disruptive. Like the AIDS activists who were my teachers in 1989 and dying in 1991 were saying, what was at stake were our lives. That was what was compelling those guys in ACT UP to fight with such abandon. But in order to be open to the flow of the Earth’s energy, which would compel you to fight for your life, your body has to be awake to your actual relationship to the world around you. And that’s the umbilical cord that has been cut for so many people on this planet. They don’t understand that their bodies are a part of this Earth.

Is there anything else you want to leave readers with?

The young have been obscenely burdened with the responsibility to be a voice of moral authority for their parents and their grandparents. People are looking to a young generation to make the decisions that previous generations have been incapable of making. It’s another form of denialism.

I love Greta Thunberg, I think she’s fucking awesome. I’m so proud of all the kids who are out there fighting the good fight. But the media passing it over to a 7-year-old or a 15-year-old, and using them as the frontline that Trump can then tweet his rants at? It’s diseased. We have to start to reckon with the disease that’s curled around every aspect of our lives in this late stage of capitalism. If we’re not doing that on a daily basis, we’re just lying to ourselves.

You ask, “What can we do?” You can talk to everyone you know about this on a constant basis and try to create consensus about it. You can create groups of people and think tanks to try to counter the billionaire-subsidized think tanks that are forming our current trajectory as a species. If there’s anything you can do, it’s to get profoundly involved. Like, quit your fucking job and do something useful. Hold yourself accountable. It’s painful, I can say that from experience. You’re going to have to sit with your own hypocrisy. And then you have to get real comfortable with people telling you that you’re a killjoy.