A young girl stands on the slopes of a valley, looking up at the sky. She smiles affectionately, and asks for one more burst of hellfire to take her to her family.

The imagery in 'Drone Bomb Me', the stunning opening track to Anohni's HOPELESSNESS is an astonishing, revolting gut-punch. Anohni, as the songwriter and leader of Antony and the Johnsons, used to trade in balance and beauty. Now, with a new name and a new public identity, she has gained a mean ferocity which she directs at some of the great injustices of the world: the rampant exploitation of the earth, catastrophic climate change, America’s militarism and hypocritical domestic policy. While it portrays a world fully worth its description as hopeless, it is an angry album, and that anger fuels Anohni's stark lyrics.

That said, it is not an album that sinks into despair by any means. Its central tension is how it plays this dark subject matter off against its euphoric, ecstatic sound. Anohni sings over vibrant electronic soundscapes that cut straight across the explicit message of the album for much of its run time. While some tracks, such as the crushing indictment of 'Obama' do allow for tone and message to coincide, most tracks are in a state of deep cognitive dissonance.

It is impossible to understate how direct and painful the lyrics on HOPELESSNESS are. Lead single '4 Degrees' celebrates the impending doom of a world ravaged by climate change: "I wanna hear the dogs crying for water / I wanna see fish go belly-up in the sea / All those lemurs and all those tiny creatures / I wanna see them burn, it's only 4 degrees". The nadir of the album is 'Crisis' – any single one of its verses could be quoted for its repetitious desperation: "Daughter / If I filled up your mass graves / And attacked your countries / Under false premise / I’m sorry".

These metaphors and characterisations are the driving force of the album. Plenty of artists find material in the conflicts of the world. A very select few are willing to address them head on, acknowledge their own complicity, and still strive to make amends.

The weaponry which delivers these ideas is the combination of bombast and power in the songwriting and production, and Anohni's unparalleled voice. With a vibrato and warmth reminiscent of Nina Simone and a dry, sunken fire and tripping cadence out of Berlin-era Bowie, she is capable of drawing out the most subtle of details as in the calmer tracks such as 'I Don't Love You Anymore' and album closer 'Marrow'.

By contrast, while she evokes a noxious, claustrophobic urgency through vocal effects on the album's slower middle section of 'Obama' and 'Violent Men', she explodes with righteous, embattled passion on the final stretch of electrifying tracks, most notably 'Why Did You Separate Me from the Earth?' and 'Crisis'.

The production, meanwhile, is shared by Anohni with two titans of electronic music in recent years. Hudson Mohawke, possibly now best known for being half of TNGHT and for production credits for Kanye West, provides the framework for the album: day-glo, hip-hop inflected dance music. Features of his solo production from releases such as Satin Panthers EP are evident in the insanely obnoxious brass that carries '4 Degrees' and the greasy, searing synth parts that twist around Anohni's lead lines.

The second collaborator is Daniel Lopatin, best known as Oneohtrix Point Never. While his mark is not broadly felt in the structure of the tracks, and the songs bearing his co-writing credit are certainly less immediately grabbing, his mark is unmistakeable on the album's overall sound palette. His 2013 release R Plus Seven took its thoroughly hollow sounding instrumentation from the presets of a cheap 80s synth keyboard. While HOPELESSNESS' sound is substantially more modern, it retains much of its basic, 2D transparency and brittleness in its rave pianos and angular synthetic strings. In both sound design and subject matter, this is not an album which hides itself from view.

It may be tempting to draw some kind of transformation story about Anohni – this musical shift coincides with her public transition, and she has been a trans icon for as long as she has been in the public eye. Ultimately though, this album does not run in contrast to her past work, rather, in concert with it. At its core it is a politically radical album, and needs a radical form to support it. In this sense the shift towards electronic music makes perfect sense – her intent is to create a violent, potent and, ultimately, mobilising statement. Both the deep conflict and transcendent quality embedded in the fabric of dance music –its essential, perpetually undetermined dissonance – makes this a unique and unparalleled album. The fact is, the world Anohni is describing is no longer one which can be simply decried. We are just as complicit in committing these egregious crimes as the villains of our stories.

Beyond its politics though, this album is radical in the truest sense – it looks at a world riddled with horror befitting true hopelessness, and it is willing to face it down and celebrate the awful, flawed humanity that sits at its centre.