Anohni & The Johnsons share video for ‘Sliver of Ice’, with lyrics inspired by conversation with Lou Reed

Second track to be revealed from My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross album

Anohni, the British-born, New York-based singer and musician, has shared ‘Sliver of Ice’, the new single/video from Anohni and the Johnson’s forthcoming album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross.

Anohni says the lyics “Now that I’m almost gone/Sliver of ice upon my tongue/In the day’s night/It tastes so good, it felt so right/For the first time in my life” were written remembering some of the last words the late Lou Reed shared with her.

“A friend of mine expressed to me in the final months of his life,” she says, referring to Reed, “that the simplest sensations had begun to feel almost rapturous; a carer had placed a shard of ice on his tongue one day and it was such a sweet and unbelievable feeling that it caused him to weep with gratitude. He was a hardcore kind of guy and these moments were transforming the way he was seeing things. I wrote ‘Sliver of Ice,’ remembering those words of his.”

My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross expresses a world view by shape-shifting through a broad range of subject matter. Through a personal lens, Anohni addresses loss of loved ones, inequality, alienation, acceptance, cruelty, ecocide, devastation wrought by Abrahamic theologies, Future Feminism, and the possibility that we might yet transform our ways of thinking, our spiritual ideas, our societal structures, and our relationships with the rest of nature.

My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is due for release on July 7 on Secretly Canadian/Rough Trade. Click here to pre-order on vinyl or CD