Live Review: ANOHNI - Barbican Centre, London 23/04/2026
ANOHNI brings her Wilderness tour to the Barbican to deliver the most spellbinding, purely magical set you’ll see in a lifetime.
Clad all in black and entering the Barbican to a stunned silence and a wall of static noise, ANOHNI is about to embark on a life-changing show that few are capable of bettering, that few can come anywhere close to matching. Her skills as art rock are visionary, moving beyond her seismic environment rallying cry about the Great Barrier Reef that she performed last year with the Johnsons, to deliver a breathtakingly intimate solo set of renewed proportions and spirit: this is the Wilderness tour, a celebration of her work to date so far – and a reminder that change, yes, real change – can be accomplished if the mind is set to do the right thing.
The 14 song setlist is perfectly crafted that spans both original songs and covers: Lou Reed, Jamie Saft and Bob Dylan all get a run out in the early half of the set; ANOHNI’s take on I Was Young When I Left Home feels raw and complex, utterly emotional. Equally she brings a different, unique twist on Perfect Day, the Lou Reed classic – able to take both songs and do what few can, make them completely and utterly her own. If you wouldn’t have already known they were covers – you’d think she came up with them herself. But it’s a touching tribute to a mentor, Reed, who gave her a platform to British audiences in the 2003 album The Raven, where she sang a version of Candy Says. The striking performances are given renewed weight here – and they feel fresh and recharged.
Anger can be fuelled as energy and you get a sense of palpable rage through ANOHNI’s lyrics: Drone Bomb Me, deployed in the run up to a break with euphoric cheers from a devoted crowd, has never felt more relevant: “Blow my head off / explode my crystal guts / lay my purple on the grass” she chants, luring audience in an avant-rock protest song about the evils of war: this was thematically backed up in the album release by a song just titled Obama; not featured in the live set – what an ANOHNI record now would make of a Trump Presidency we can only wonder.
Thom Yorke once said that “If I was going to write a song about climate change in 2015 it would be shit,” and that it was much harder to do that now than in the 1960s. ANOHNI’s Wilderness tour and her record Hopelessness feels like an instant answer to that: no, sit down, you’re wrong – if anything, it’s got even more relevant with age: released back in 2016 and still carrying as much thematic weight as the old school protest songs – interestingly, the Dylan song chosen here is not one of his protest tracks – or at least; what might appear one as not at first glance: instead what was something she worked on with Bryce Dessner in 2009.
Dylan’s analysis further adds to his myth; “all these songs are connected / I thought I was just extending the line” and that shows the evolution of this track and how it can keep going long beyond him, given different styles and different journeys. Having since been repurposed under Anohni for Dark Was the Night for the Red Hot Organization, It’s very much used here with giving this song a sense of yearning and homesickness for the past – thematic weight when incorporated with a set full of nostalgia for a world irreversibly changed by the climate crisis.
The eco-feminist themes running through this set give added depth and weight to her electronic, experimental avant-classical music. In the back half of the set – white text over screen ascends over an otherwise blacked out stage – and offers an answer to what could be done to combat the overwhelming feeling of despair: creativity. “the hunger of mosquitos / the emotions of prostitutes / the abandoned and forgotten places inhabited by people like me / wilderness her creativity: searching, endless, non-hierarchical revolving, emerging designs. I imagine there was a point within un-ness that became sentiment. His horror of his aloneness, of his un-ness, drove him to reach a new survival strategy: creativity.”
The set may not use feature interviews with scientists and live footage of the great barrier reef that her set in 2025 did; when watched under lights at Primavera Sound festival, Barcelona, so incredibly breathtaking in its own right – the build-up to set-closure 4 Degrees has lost none of its impact, talking up the rise in global temperature and the wish list that triggers the impending apocalypse “I want to hear the dogs crying for water / I want to see the fish go belly up in the sea / and all those lemurs and all those tiny creatures / I want to see them burn”.
It is as much a teardown of an oil lord as it is her complicity of her own self in the climate crisis and 4 Degrees; thematic weight is so deeply resonating it will bring the right audience to tears. It’s uniquely perfect in its portrayal of oversight and arrogance and how it can humble someone: the show here at the Barbican is sold out, and there is not a soul in the room sitting down by the time ANOHNI brings her set to an emotional, therapeutic close.
This is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime show that everyone should have the chance to experience at least once. Wilderness transports you to a whole new world for the length of its runtime: 7:30, more or less, through to 9pm, no support, straight in – because what support could even hope to get the crowd ready for *that*? There are few who could. The Barbican is the perfect home for a venue like this: and it feels completely and utterly transformative.
Words by Miles Milton-Jefferies
Photo Credit: Rita Zappador (taken in Barcelona)
