Song Exploder - Anohni - 4 Degrees

Episode Date: June 11, 2025

Anohni is a singer and songwriter originally from England, who started putting out music in 2000. She’s released 6 albums, and won the Mercury Prize. She’s also been nominated for two Brit Awards, and an Oscar. For this episode, I talked to her about the song "4 Degrees," from her 2016 album Hopelessness. It might be strange to describe a song about climate change as an anthem, but that’s what I think it is, and it feels more urgent with every passing year. It’s also one of my most listened-to songs. It was produced by two of my favorite electronic musicians: Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, and Ross Birchard, aka Hudson Mohawke. I got to speak to Ross about how he started the track on his own, before it became a collaboration between the three of them. This is an episode that I’ve been trying to make happen since 2016. Here it is.For more info, visit songexploder.net/anohni.Thanks to Sonos for their support of the podcast. Check out sonos.com.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Anoni is a singer and songwriter, originally from England, who started putting out music in 2000. She's released six albums and won the Mercury Prize. She's also been nominated for two Brit Awards and an Oscar. For this episode, I talked to her about the song, Four Degrees, from her 2016 album, Hopelessness. It might be strange to describe a song about climate change as an anthem, But that's what I think it is, and it feels more urgent with every passing year.

It's also one of my most listened to songs. It was produced by two of my favorite electronic musicians, Daniel O'Patten, aka One O'Trix Point Never, and Ross Burchard, aka Hudson Mohawk. I got to speak to Ross about how he started the track on his own before it became a collaboration between the three of them. This is an episode I've been trying to make happen since 2016. Here it is.

My name is Anon My name is Anoni. I had started working on an album with Dan Lopatin on demos, electronic demos, for a whole array of songs. The record I've been making with Dan was going to be this kind of Spectral Electro record, but things weren't quite coming into focus. Hi, I am Ross Hudson Moor, who is. Hudson Mohawk.

How did you first hear Anoni's music and get connected with her? It goes back to an after party that I was at in Glasgow, just around the time I had started releasing music, so this would be mid-2000s. Someone played me this song called Hope There's Someone. Hope there's someone who take care of me when I die will I go.

You know, it was after a night of partying and I was like, oh my God. Hope there's someone who saved my heart free, nice to hold when I'm tired. Floods of tears. And I was like, what on earth is that voice? What is this? I'm always doing these notebooks full of like dream collabs. So it'd been something that I had been thinking about for years. And I actually wrote him an email.

Ross found the original email where you said, would you like to ever collaborate? And he wrote back and said, I'm actually finishing up a record. And you are somebody I would love to collaborate with, but I never reached out because I just figured it would never happen. Which is so weird, considering he was doing records with like Kanye West at the time. But okay.

But I remember that whole interaction. He is very humble. But he immediately asked me to sing. on a song with him for his record and we did it. It was a song that we called Indian Steps. And then I said, do you have anything else? And he said, oh, actually a lot of this stuff is just like rejects. Like a lot of the bigwigs have all like made their way through this old soup

and they didn't take it. I said, well, I'll take the leftovers. In my head, they were like rap instrumentals. That was a lot of what I was doing at that point. But they were very melodic and one of the first, instrumentals became four degrees I actually made it in Hawaii

and it was during sessions for Kanye stuff we had this little funny studio that's over there that it's in sort of a strip mall but when you enter the actual studio it's like oh you're looking out onto the ocean

and you know it's like volcanoes around and this kind of thing and so I had a tendency to lean into these sort of like anthemic chord progressions. Do you remember what the first sound was that he created for it? I think it was the drums. I wanted something that is almost orchestral,

but it has the punch of an electronic thing. Almost like it's like a timpony. Yeah. To make the drums so hard hitting, and the reason things felt so ballistic is because in the way that people used to double vocal tracks, he would double drum tracks. And I was also really obsessed with the horn section in general.

The important thing for me was it had to almost have like a fanfare quality to. And so I was like programming these core progressions where some of the notes are so close together that the way they interact with each other brings another layer of emotion into. Sometimes people program synth versions of orchestras. orchestral instruments as like a placeholder. Was that what you felt like you were doing? Or did you specifically prefer the sound of these horns over something actually orchestral? I was kind of obsessed at that point with making things that were programmed,

but that you couldn't always tell where I liked that uncanny valley. Is there like 10 guys banging on drums there? a hundred people playing here and this is some huge thing. I like that confusion. I mean, what's this sound? Yeah, that's a great, great little synth called Sin Plant. And it faces like a combination of like a plant and a bunch of DNA strands. Basically like you can grow a sound out of one,

seed that you plant. It's not that impressive to look at, but I always wanted to use synths and sounds that I knew I wasn't hearing in dance music. That feels unfamiliar to me in a good way. What did you think of Ross's instrumental when you first heard it? I was very, very into it, very, very compelled by it. And it was the kind of music I was listening to. The music I was doing, working with all these other orchestral arrangers. I was doing symphonic shows. I did the symphony show at Radio City, Theatre Royal in Madrid, at the Royal Opera House in London.

I mean, the shows were really elevated, and they were beautiful. But within two or three years, I felt like I'd sort of done it. So it was so refreshing to get into electronic beats in a way that hadn't for a long time. Everything came into focus for the album and the project when I heard Ross's demos and they were so ballistic and so seductive, it took me out of the role of primary songwriter

and put me more into the one who devised the message that would be embedded in the song. And everything that I've been thinking about for the last several years just crawled out of the crevices of my mind. It was like my whole last six years plus, of obsession with what was going on and the national and global scale just like erupted into lyric.

It's only four degrees. It's only four degrees. It's only four degrees. It's only four degrees. Could you just explain the premise of four degrees and where that phrase came from? So about 14 years ago, in the science journals

and in consumers, ready science unpackings of global warming, they were delivering us these charts that would say, what were one degree of warming like? What were two degrees, three degrees, four degrees, and six degrees? And they always said six degrees warming was the point of no return. The world would become uninhabitable. Four degrees, at the time I wrote the song,

which was actually 2012, was being described in science journals, as an apocalyptic shift in the environment, in the biosphere, in the stratosphere and in the ways that it would affect us and our civilizations. Well, even two degrees promises the end of the coral systems and increasingly forest systems. By the time you get to four degrees, you've pretty much wrapped up all of the gentle systems that have taken millions of years to emerge. You know, the gentle systems of balance, the very beautiful choreography of interdependence that pours forth when nature is in balance.

So four degrees was kind of a battle cry, a bugle cry of an apocalyptic future. And the idea with the song was to shock people into realizing how perverse it was that we were invoking a level of suffering that we weren't prepared for, the end of life on Earth. But I was suggesting by saying, let's go, it's only four degrees.

I was trying to embody the voice of people that will drive us to extinction in the alcoholic style of denial. And the harm that they particularly will have facilitated will reverberate. So in many ways, I think that was part of the seduction of four degrees for me to take the position of someone that was delighting in this collapse. But at the same time, It's not entirely sarcastic because it's also like a more honest reckoning with the reality of my carbon footprint. I want to hear the dogs crying for water.

I want to see the fish go belly up in the sea. Yeah, if I want to see the dogs crying for water, I want to see the fish go belly up in the sea. Because every time I take a plane to do a concert, that's effectively what I'm inviting. So there is a voice in me that feels this way, or at least should be feeling this way. If it's not naming it, it's because it's in a state of denial. But because of the firewalls of capitalism, I've been shielded from the impacts of my daily footprint in every seamless meal that I eat, in every distance that I travel. That's so interesting, because I've always heard the first version of what you were talking about, singing from the point of view of like a heart. villain who doesn't care about the effects of climate change or even kind of delights in them.

But I never thought about the idea that you could be the villain, that this isn't a character that you're making up, but you're singing about your own complicit part in all of this. It's the most excruciating part because I can't point a finger at Donald Trump and not see a part of myself in him as a passive beneficiary of his brutal policy, just as any white person in America. is a beneficiary of all the racist and monstrous policies of imperialism that led to this Goldilocks zone of our petrochemical comforts because it's not just the voice of the other.

It is my voice. You know, it is my intention. And I think that that's something I've tried quite brazenly to embody this idea that this illness that our society suffered from was also within me. My conversation with Anoni and Hudson Mohawk continues after that. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length,

and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of things. that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wynrope.

I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. What was your reaction to what Anoni did with the instrumental you sent her? I remember she's sending the song back to me with some kind of rough vocals that actually are about real issues. And I was like, God, these are so heartfelt and beautiful and delicate. And there was so much feeling and emotion in just the recordings of them. Is there something that she does vocally in particular that you really love? It's at the end of one of the verses where the line is I want to see them boil.

I want to see this world. I want to see it boil. I want to see this world. I want to see it boil. The kind of vibrato on that boil. It's so kind of haunting, but it's so beautiful at the same time. And it's not only the voice, but their delivery. Did the instrumental change at all? Did you change it after getting sort of like the first draft or first round of vocals? Yeah, the arrangement changed and we did all Dan's synth parts.

Oh, right! The Death Siren. Yeah, this is Daniel. Dan brought this to bring about this emotional response. He's a master of that. Dan is such a sensitive composer. Dan's themes are not something. something I could ever conceive of. He has a very fluid, idiosyncratic grasp of melody and

counter melodies that I could never put my finger on. What was it like for you to collaborate in this way with, you know, not just one, but two different producers, both of whom have their own very distinct and, you know, specific aesthetics? What was it like for you to work with both of them together? They were amazing together. Hudson actually helped facilitate a more productive relationship between me and Dan, because it sort of loosened up my grips about what the creative process should entail. And Ross was also like a master of the emotional rush.

So between the two of them, they really were quite amazing. This was really the first album I ever wrote so collaboratively with other people. I was so proud of the work that they did. And I felt so supported by them. And I think that they caught the fever of the record in a way because there wasn't really anything else. saying these things at that time. I want to burn the sky.

I want to burn the breeze. I want to see the animals die in the trees. Let's go, let's go. It's only four degrees. Let's go. It's only four degrees. It's actually one of the most personal records to me that I've done. It had this sort of gravitas to it.

And during the making of the making of, it, I was unsure if that was going to translate. But it really, really worked and it really was like an eye-opener for me. I didn't quite realize the gravity or the magnitude of it at the time of making it. Otherwise, I probably would have freaked out and never finished it. But the way it only interpreted the instrumentals and delivered the vocals and the way Daniel brought his elements, it was like, oh, these loops that are about, being sat on my hard drive, they're like alive now, you know.

Do you believe now in 2025 that art has the power to affect social change? I've never believed it actually had the power to affect social change. Really? I don't think it does. Personally, I don't. But I do think there's power in art. I do think there's power in music especially. It's like the bugle for an army.

My job was to sing the song of my people, people that are on the front lines of dreaming the most productively about social transformation. I went into this project, maybe with the delusion that I was going to be confronting power. But I think in the end, the people that this music most served or people that felt exactly the same way I do, I think it was this album that really made me realize

that people don't listen to music that they don't agree with. People listen to music that are first music, confirms them. Well, the album was called hopelessness, and I was wondering if that's what you still feel now. Yeah, I mean, it's a feeling. I think the word there is feel. Yeah. Like, hopelessness is a feeling. That's all it is. It's not an indication of what's happening or what's going to happen. It's just another feeling. But the feeling isn't that relevant,

except in how it motivates you from day to day. So if hopelessness as a feeling is disempowering you in your activism or in your engagement, then I would be able to you. I'd say, don't entertain it. For me, I need to like honor all my feelings. Yeah. You know, maybe don't drown in it, but I needed to say it. Hope is irrelevant. It doesn't pardon you from the table of the conversation.

It doesn't pardon you from the anxiety of what's really happening. This is happening and it's continuing to happen. And there is no exit strategy for this conversation. So, yes, I feel extremely hopeless. And does that matter? No. And now here's 4 Degrees by Anoni in its entirety. It's only 4 degrees. It's only 4 degrees. It's only 4 degrees.

It's only 4.5.000. Visit SongExploder.net slash Anoni to learn more. You'll find links to buy or stream 4 degrees. You'll also find a link to listen to the episode that 1O Trick's Point Never did back in 2016. This episode was produced by me, Mary Dolan, Craig Ely, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Biscop. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,

a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. And if you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter, which you can find on the Song Exploder website. And if you want to support the show in another way, you can get a Song Exploder t-shirt at Songexploader.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh, your way. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.