UK Edition
Review
Grimes, Miss Anthropocene, review: meet the evil goddess of eco-pop
It has been five years since Canadian electro maverick Grimes released an album, during which period her status as a counterculture weirdo has been transformed by developments in her personal life. In her civilian guise of Claire Boucher, she has been romantically linked with Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX with a public image somewhere between sci-fi visionary and James Bond villain.
Their intriguing relationship has had the unlikely effect of casting the 31-year-old left-field multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter-producer as part of a glamorous global power couple. In interviews, Boucher has complained bitterly about losing control of a persona it took a decade of fiercely independent music to construct. “If I’m stuck being a villain, I want to pursue villainy artistically,” she recently declared.
The result is Miss Anthropocene, a concept album centred on an “anthropomorphic goddess” whose beauty contestant identity mixes misanthrope with the scientific term for our human-influenced geological epoch. As she said in an interview, “I wanted to make climate change fun.”
It is a bold concept for a dazzling album, although I suspect most listeners would be hard pressed to make much sense of it without Boucher’s interpolations. She has described herself as a post-internet artist, her musical identity forged in a medium where genre distinctions have collapsed, and Miss Anthropocene is another almost bewildering exercise in eclecticism.
The gauzily ethereal intro chant So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth gives way to a brooding slice of heavy electro topped off with a hysterical monologue from Taiwanese rapper PAN. It seems to bear no obvious relationship to the acoustic California pop strum of Delete Forever, which comes across like Taylor Swift covering Oasis (“I did everything/ More lines on the mirror than a sonnet”), itself rammed up against the throbbing synth-pop of Violence, with its honeysweet vocals about sado-masochism (“You wanna make me bad and I like it like that”).
There’s a dreamy synth ballad (New Gods), a bruising slice of goth metal (My Name Is Dark) and a gentle wisp of floaty folktronica (IDORU). In common with Grimes’s much-admired 2015 album Art Angels, it barely sounds like the work of one artist, although there are shared characteristics across her genre experiments. Grimes is masterful at layering textures, with strangely treated vocals draped over ever-shifting grooves, creating a mesmeric sense that things are moving behind and through each other. The lyrical tone is dark, with a lot of references to self-harm, but the vocal treatments are so distracting that it would be impossible to comprehend what Grimes is actually singing without a lyric sheet.
Connecting her violent metaphors to a coherent argument about mankind’s relationship to the environment is a bit of a stretch. “You’re gonna get sick/ I don’t know when/ I never doubt it,” she chants on 4Æm as if it were the most enticing prospect in the world. Maybe climate change does seem more fun if you can escape on a spaceship to Mars.
Miss Anthropocene is released by 4AD on February 21