Grimes - Miss Anthropocene

Grimes imagined climate change as a goddess, then built an album around her. Miss Anthropocene turns ecological collapse into dark mythology, wrapping one of Grimes’ bleakest concepts in some of her most immediate electronic music.

Originally released in 2020, Miss Anthropocene was Grimes’ fifth studio album and the long-awaited follow-up to Art Angels. Its title is a play on “misanthrope” and the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch defined by humanity’s impact on the planet. Rather than approaching environmental destruction as straightforward protest music, Grimes personifies it through a collection of demons and deities, transforming addiction, violence, technological anxiety, and climate catastrophe into characters within a surreal mythology.

Musically, the record moves freely between darkwave, industrial pop, dream pop, electronic music, and ethereal atmospherics. “So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth” opens in a weightless haze of submerged vocals and enormous low end, while “Delete Forever” unexpectedly turns toward acoustic guitar and country-tinged melancholy. “Violence,” produced with i_o, provides one of the album’s most direct club moments, and “My Name Is Dark” pushes distorted guitars and electronics into something considerably more abrasive.

Then there’s “4ÆM,” where ethereal vocals and frantic electronic percussion collide with a sample from the Bollywood film Bajirao Mastani. “You’ll miss me when I’m not around” finds beauty amid apocalyptic imagery, while “IDORU” closes the record with a surprisingly tender counterweight to everything preceding it.

The result is deliberately contradictory. Miss Anthropocene can be beautiful and grotesque, intimate and enormous, futuristic and strangely ancient. Beneath the elaborate concept is an album preoccupied with humanity’s attraction to its own destructive impulses, rendered through production dense enough to reward repeated listening.

This 2023 2LP edition presents Miss Anthropocene in an expanded vinyl format, giving Grimes’ densely layered production room to stretch across four sides.

Miss Anthropocene remains one of the strangest entries in Grimes’ catalog: an apocalyptic electronic pop record where climate anxiety, mythology, romance, and self-destruction coexist inside the same beautifully hostile world.