When Ani Kyd Wolf—then going by Ani Kyd—played some of her early recordings for her family, her grandmother didn’t recognize who the singer was. “She goes, ‘Oh, who’s that?’
“‘That’s me, Grandma!’ And she goes, ‘That’s not you. That’s a fella!’ It was the most hilarious thing,” Kyd Wolf says, laughing and shaking her head fondly and repeating, “That’s not you. That’s a fella.”
Ani thinks the recordings in question were from her early band Rumble Fish, who topped CiTR charts in 1991. Even then, she had already developed quite a fearsome vocal delivery: a deep, masculine growl inspired by Public Enemy’s Chuck D.
She realizes that sounds a bit incongruous—there’s not much rap in what she does—so she smiles and bellows an illustration, explaining the point: “HIS VOICE IS SO POWERFUL, AND IT COMES ACROSS LIKE THIS. It’s well rounded, he doesn’t go up and down, it’s just power, right?” She hits her hand with her fist—the recorder picks up the smack. “He has a way that he attacks, and I grabbed that. I wanted to create a powerful vocal, instead of one that goes—” She adopts a squeaky faux-punkette vocal and shrieks, “byah byah byah byah byah BYAH. To me, that was great for some punk rock, but I was going for something else.”
Her first name, she explains, should be pronounced to more or less rhyme with “Johnny,” not “Annie,” which apparently only Vancouver’s own celeb interviewer Nardwuar consistently gets right. Readers not familiar with her vocal stylings should try “Reload Diablo Reload” by her previous band, Fuel Injected .45, for a sample. It’s not her only style, but it’s what she’s come to be known for.
There are elements where that toughness is still front and centre on Ani’s new album, The Last Steps of Man-Unkind, but mostly the vocals have a different quality, alternately haunting, sombre, scolding, and even at times vaguely operatic. “I Am an Evangelist” has Ani add a sleazy Bible Belt drawl to her voice, while “US Sinners” has a blues snarl to it that brings (no foolin’) Diamanda Galás to mind.
And the varied vocal delivery suits the songs, which were written with Ani’s long-time collaborator Marc L’Esperance and realized with Sons of Freedom bassist Don Binns. Driving and heavy, the songs are also multilayered and rich, with a quasi-industrial quality—they’re thinking-woman’s punk rock, compared to the grungy, direct, fist-in-the-guts punch of Fuel Injected .45.
Ani Kyd Wolf with Don Binns (left) and Marc L’Esperance (centre).
“I only pull out those intense, harsh vocals for one song, called ‘Put the Gun Down,’” she explains. A gentle warning that the video’s central theme is school shootings, so the content might be upsetting, whether you’re a teenaged survivor or a member of the NRA: Ani challenges the right to bear arms as headlines about massacred children cascade by. It’s “the one song where I just give it. That’s the power song. And I remember when Jello heard that, it’s like, ‘There we go. There’s our girl.’”
She is talking, of course, of Dead Kennedys’ founding vocalist, Jello Biafra, whose San Francisco-based record label, Alternative Tentacles, has just released Ani’s new LP, the latest in nearly two decades of collaborations. Her unmistakable voice appears in the song “I Am an Evangelist.” Ani also supported Jello, in one capacity or other, the last three times he was in Vancouver; co-produced his podcast, Renegade Roundtable; and directed the rock videos for his last album (try the Trump-themed title track, “Tea Party Revenge Porn,” for a sample). “I love him,” she says. “Jello is more to me like family than a friend, at this point.”
She is explaining this over a vegan lunch she has prepared for my wife and me in a house on the grounds of Industrial Works, a set-decoration company in Langley that also works with location scouts in the Vancouver film industry. Some of the props for Ani’s own video for “Put the Gun Down” are in eyeshot of the table where we are eating, but we don’t recognize them for what they are yet. You could probably find the helicopter she used for the video for “War” on a Google Maps search of Langley. After lunch, on a tour of the property, she will take us over to visit it, along with props and locations used in her videos, including commissions for Mellow Friesen and Art Bergmann.
Ani Kyd Wolf stands next to the helicopter featured in her video “War.” Photo by Erika Lax.
Of course, there are plenty of talented people making independent rock videos in Vancouver, many on shoestring budgets. But none have anything like the luxury of location and set decoration that Ani’s videos have. Perhaps the best example is her video for Stephen Hamm (Theremin Man)’s “Are You Receiving Me?” in which Hamm plays a tormented astronaut, staring longingly at the planet he’s left. Sure, there’s a ton of green screen, but there’s also what appears to be an honest-to-God control panel, like something you might see in a 1970s science fiction film. And Hamm is wearing what appears to be some sort of spacesuit, complete with helmet. It’s no 2001, but compare it, say, with Em Rogers’s video for D.O.A.’s “I Live in a Car,” which includes a hand-drawn cereal box as a prop.
The two go way back—Rogers directed the movie that Ani met Jello Biafra on, The Widower—but as resourceful as Rogers is, and as charming as CineStir’s video for “I Live in a Car” may be, Ani has a lot more “toys” at her disposal, thanks to her relationship with her husband’s best friend, Patrick Doiron, who owns Industrial Works.
So how did she come to live at Industrial Works? It’s a long journey that starts with her growing increasingly frustrated with living in Vancouver. “I was kind of done. I was living in the Bruce Eriksen building for years, and that was right at Hastings and Main, and then moved to Renfrew, and then back down to Alexander Street.”
But the neighbourhood started wearing on her, with “one thing after the next that were not positive,” including “having tires slashed, screwdrivers put into my radiator, broken windows constantly, needles out in the front all the time—it was exhausting.” When she married Chris Wolf—happily adding his last name to hers, because it’s “a pretty fucking cool name”—she took a break from Vancouver and went to live with him in the small B.C. town of Hixon, where he had a house. “Up north, it’s a completely different lifestyle. You think that you’d be outside more, and you’d be hiking, but if you’re not really an outdoorsy person, you don’t do that. And in the winter, you don’t go out at all. There’s times when Chris and I would be locked in for weeks on end and I would be like, ‘It’s really good that we like each other.’”
The vibe of the community was different, too. “They didn’t care who you were, what movie you did. They were just like, ‘Okay, that’s great. Can you dig a ditch? Can you plant a garden? Can you take care of yourself?’ And I loved that, because it made me feel like I was part of a community, not where it was like, ‘Oh, who are you? What band do you play in?’ I dealt with that for most of my life in Vancouver. It was like you were always on a weird display.”
Ani doesn’t even remember the last time she played a full concert in the city. She’s made a couple of guest appearances at the yearly Lou Reed tribute and SPCA benefit concert, but to my memory, her last major show in town was the 2013 Jello Biafra 55th-birthday bash that took place at the Rickshaw. She did join Ministry on tour for 2023—Al Jourgensen is another good friend of hers—but as of this interview, she’s thinking there won’t be a record release show for The Last Steps of Man Un-Kind, at least not locally.
“That’s one of the reasons I shot all the videos. Because to me, people are so visual. They sit at home in their pyjamas and watch TV or their computers or tablets, and they want to see what the music is.”
Directing has become an important creative outlet for Ani in recent years, and it’s something she wants to do more of—including a couple of as-yet-unrealized projects she’s working on with the Night of the Living Dead screenwriter John Russo. “I’ve been producing as a way of making money or to get further along in my career, but mainly I really love directing, and that’s where my creative output is, like with music.”
Ani Kyd Wolf tests out the control panel used in the video she directed for “Are You Receiving Me?” Photo by Allan MacInnis.
Given such goals, it seemed prudent for her to be closer to the Lower Mainland, hence her and Chris Wolf’s eventual return here. Besides videos for herself and her friends, she’s been doing a steady stream of interviews for Punk Globe’s YouTube channel, including with Hamm, Bergmann, punk memoirist and band biographer Chris Walter, and most recently, Bev Davies, though that probably won’t be online for a couple of months.
Moving back was also important for the music. “Marc and I were writing the music and started to do the album, so that was one of the reasons I came down here, so I could be close to the studio. We didn’t have to throw files back and forth, and we were there together writing it. It worked out really well.”
The album is not just a platform for the videos—though there are some potent ones indeed. The ones available, like “America,” about police violence against African Americans, pull no punches. Other videos are being dropped weekly by Alternative Tentacles. There will be 10 in all.
“It’s kind of my outlook on the way things are now. Lyrically, it’s very different for me, this album, because it’s extremely political. I’m at a time in my life where these are things that matter. These are the things that I’m watching in the news, and it just seems more and more unreal, the way the world is going.”
It’s refreshing to see such unabashed political content in rock videos, I remark. It’s become somewhat exceptional—and she agrees: people are too scared to alienate potential audiences. But Ani’s somewhat fearless when it comes to confrontation, for good reason. “Look at things people like Trump and Elon Musk are doing, they’re calling Canada a state and Trudeau a governor. It’s as fucked up and disrespectful as you could get. And people’s jaws are dropping—it’s really scary. The whole Project 2025 agenda and the stuff that’s going on with that, it’s mind blowing. A lot of it is geared to really awful things, and a lot of it could happen in the next year. I don’t even want to say the next four years. People have to stand up somehow. If they don’t, it’s only going to get way worse… I feel like, by putting out the album, maybe it can help, maybe it can give people some strength or just some awareness or just feel like somebody else understands.”
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