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February 21, 2020 - 4AD
The revered capitalist and budding misanthrope Claire Elise Boucher released Miss Anthropocene February 21 of this year, her fifth album as Grimes . From its open, which includes dark post-techno and minimally textured soundscapes over which she lilts to its close with ‘Idoru,’ Grimes finds a plethora of non-coherent sounds and bends them to her will, crafting musical structures that would devolve to nonsense in most other hands. The album reveals its gifts in genre-bending under Grimes’ nimble and well-honed production. In many moments the album, especially ‘So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth,’ is redolent of early Marxist Grimes, before she had such a refined appreciation for power and became a transhumanist carrying Elon Musk’s child.
Take this moment as the central experience of the album: hitting the back of your head against a wall, wondering about brain damage afterwards, but mostly feeling grateful for the thickness of your skull and marveling about the hardness of the wall, how the two of you are equally matched when it comes to inadvertent run-ins (I.e. the head banging). In Miss Antropocene Grimes canonizes a new group of demiurges from ‘Violence,’ god of video games, to ‘Dark,’ god of political apathy. Her latest album is the selling of her catharsis.
Made on a series of bad moods and general despondence, she told Apple Music, Miss Anthropocene finds Grimes letting her new world view work out is kinks in the studio. The album’s centerpiece and thesis, ‘New Gods,’ makes the argument for an updated pantheon on the premise that both the old gods and the current have let down their people. Yet only modes of dysfunction or distraction populate Grimes’ dark holy kingdom. ⛰️