Canadian-born pop artist Grimes often sings in the voices of imaginary characters; the spirit of her new album, Miss Anthropocene (an evident pun on "misanthropy"), is a malevolent goddess who personifies climate change.
Miss Anthropocene is a dark record, at times almost indefensibly nihilistic, but at its best it recalls modern horror movies like Us or Parasite, which frighten us with a larger purpose in mind β to shock us into rethinking certain attitudes.
The woman behind Grimes, Claire Boucher, grew up loving anime, and her pop persona frequently presents like a science fiction warrior superhero. Boucher's also a technical auteur, producing her own densely-layered music and telling stories both visceral and cryptic.
My favorite song on the new album, "Darkseid," features the Taiwanese rapper ζ½PAN (formerly Aristophanes), with whom Grimes previously worked with on the Art Angels track, "SCREAM." With Asian-language artists like BTS on English-language pop charts, the collaboration is surprisingly on-trend, except that it features a woman poeticizing ecological suicide, rather than men shoveling boilerplate love songs.
That's how Grimes works: Her music pushes the pleasure buttons of mainstream pop while also appearing to critique it. Another example is the song "Before the Fever," which could be heard as a reckless come-on, or a statement of apocalyptic fact.
We are in a cultural moment where songs about depression, even suicide, have become pop lingua franca β as they have been occasionally at other points throughout the history of songwriting. In that sense, Miss Anthropocene fits into a long tradition of songs conjuring depression, even if Grimes frames them abstractly. It's not what I normally expect from a 21st century pop album, but that's why, despite all the darkness, Grimes' music continues to fascinate.
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