The Paradise EP, a companion piece to Anohni’s stunning 2016 album Hopelessness, is set to be released this Friday, but fans will only be able to buy six of the seven tracks. In order to get your hands on the seventh song, I Never Stopped Loving You, you’ll need to pay for it with a different kind of currency: vulnerability.
“If you have listened to my music over the years, you know that I have publicly given something of my heart,” Anohni posted on Facebook earlier today. In exchange for the new track, she is asking fans to return that gesture, by emailing “a sentence or two what you care most about, or your hopes for the future” to anohni@rebismusic.com. “Send this to me instead of the dollar you used to send me in the olden days,” she writes, explaining, “The price for this song is a gesture of anonymous vulnerability. That may be too expensive for some of you, and that’s okay”.
“I want to hear your collective mind. I want to see that river of thoughts,” Anohni continues, asking fans not to write about her or her music, but instead to focus in on themselves. “Take a risk and break out of established ways of doing and perceiving,” she urges, adding, “It is what you have expected of me as an artist, and just for a moment, it is what I ask of you”. If you do so, she will email I Never Stopped Loving You in return, a song “which represents some of my better thinking” and is intended to be played as the final track of the EP.
Read: Watch the video for Paradise, the EP’s title track
Credits
Text Charlotte Gush