Album Review: Grimes – Miss Anthropocene


Miss Anthropocene 1




Since she burst into our consciousness at the end of the noughties it’s been increasingly difficult to separate Claire Boucher from the various fractured identities she’s presented, a mass of contradictions which in the always-on age has strangely felt more comforting than dystopian.

A case in point is the way in which her last record, 2015’s Art Angels, has mutated from a critically acclaimed triumph into, in her own words, ‘a stain on my life’. More well publicised troubles, this time with her present label 4AD, followed that stark reassessment, gifting the cynical with the impression that Miss Anthropocene, her last release for them, was a project born under creative duress.

On another day, however, the artist’s enthusiasm and perpetually unique way of evaluating her work gives us snippets of the thought process behind them, such as the fabulously quotable precis, ‘It’s a concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change: A psychedelic, space-dwelling demon/ beauty-Queen who relishes the end of the world. She’s composed of Ivory and Oil’.

Just another day in Grimesville then? Well, the answer is yes. And no. And maybe yes. Any thoughts that this firebreak with the past was due to shred the singer’s by now familiar creative sweet spots – helium sweet K-Pop, gothic techno, dysmorphic R&B – and replace them with a harder edged nihilism are largely countermanded here, with the amen-breaking exception of 4ÆM, a stop-start, chaotic slew of hyperactivity also to be included on the soundtrack of the video game Cyberpunk 2077.

Elsewhere, whether the reigning in of weird is conscious or just another direction, the vision at least is clearer: Violence, the collaboration with DeadMau5 producer i_o, is elegantly pristine, if the lyrics allude to a greedy take-take relationship, while opener So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth is tribally dreamlike and New Gods steeped in post-truth melodrama.

These tropes are substantially or otherwise the qualities for which Art Angels was and remains so cherished, at least by its audience. But there are also some welcome new avenues, incarnated via the bass heavy rumble of ;You’ll miss me when I’m not around’, ‘Before the fever’s apocalyptical haze (sample lyric: ‘This is the sound of the end of the world’), and Darkseid’s bubbling sub-operatics. Mythical deities aside though, if there’s a theme it’s of personal conflict on a planet with little emotion, one drained of both colour and vibrancy. Put simply, it feels cold here.

We’re moving closer to the time when avatars will become performers and composers in their own right. Grimes is becoming her own Deus Ex Machina, a shivering hologram of what this near future could be offer up. Miss Anthropocene is neither weezy contractual fulfillment or a timeslipped relic from a world of gimmicky AI.

Instead, it’s a cluster of loosely associated idea-snippets which may, in the days to come of greater enlightenment, make much more sense than they do now.



7/10

Andy Peterson


Learn More