Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene
Having digested Grimes’ concept album Miss Anthropocene, Getintothis’ Lee Grimsditch sees if it was worth the wait.
Listening to Miss Anthropocene, the highly anticipated follow up to Grimes‘ (aka Claire Boucher) critically acclaimed 2015 album Art Angels, it’s fair to say a lot has happened in Boucher’s personal and professional life in the interim years.
After Art Angels, Boucher transformed from reasonably well-known EDM artist to a regular name on the lips of gossip columnists; something that’s less to do with her music and more to do with a well-publicised relationship with Elon Musk and now her impending motherhood.
Strangely, this has meant her celebrity has risen faster than her music has caught on, leaving her undoubted talent playing catch-up.
This is not a criticism. Boucher’s music and aesthetic is too left-field – and let’s be frank – “out there” for her to be vying for chart positions with the current crop of pop queens in a conservative pop landscape.
The reality is that her relative strangeness that keeps Grimes from greater commercial success is undoubtedly also her unique selling point.
Her first two albums, Geidi Prima and Halafaxa, are all to do with Boucher having the freedom as an underground artist to find her voice as a songwriter.
The first album is full of ditties that lack direction and composition, rather than fully developed songs – something that would not really begin to emerge until Visions was released in 2012.
On Visions, we begin to get a taste of Boucher’s development from an underground synth-pop artist into a songwriter capable of making people sit up and take notice.
Oblivion, the album’s promo single, had all the Grimes trademarks. It was weird, danceable electro-pop but now with memorable hooks and cohesive songwriting, resulting in more airplay on the likes of 6 Music in the UK.
Roll on three years to the release of Art Angels and few could have predicted the giant leaps Boucher would make as a songwriter in this time.
The most brilliant stage in her metamorphosis, Art Angels was a shocking burst of colour that showcased Boucher‘s maturing talent as a songwriter, producer and engineer.
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Every song on the album felt like a separate and unique event, one that showcased Boucher’s talent for writing catchy, melodic electronic dance music whilst building further on her unique aesthetic.
Art Angels also placed Boucher front-centre as a frontwoman, not just a songwriter or producer. It was the culmination of years pulling together her influences and refining her songwriting into an album of vivid and inspired pop music.
Art Angels is euphoric, energising, yet like all good art, there’s the conflict that gives the album a soul.
Lyrically confrontational, critical and dissatisfied with how she has been treated as an individual, or as a woman, lyrically Art Angels riles against its own upbeat and euphoric music.
Miss Anthropocene as a whole album inhabits a darker spectrum of moods than Art Angels.
When the new album was announced in 2019, Boucher said it was to be a concept album about an “anthropomorphic goddess of climate change” with each song “a different embodiment of human extinction”.
The songs touch on the themes of artificial intelligence and looming environmental disaster, yet still feel personal enough to keep them from sounding removed or overblown.
With the previous album being such a critical hit, it would be tempting for Boucher to bow to the pressure to produce more of the same accessible electro-pop that was at its heart.
This is not the case.
The opening track, So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth, signals a much more sombre tone that seeps through the rest of the album.
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In an interview with Apple Music, Boucher said about the track: “I think I wanted to make a sort of hard Enya song. I had a vision, a weird dream where I was just sort of falling to the earth, like fighting a Balrog.”
At just over six minutes, its ambient trippy beat is overlayed with disembodied, angelic vocals making it a dreamy and melancholic introduction to the album.
Named after a DC Comics supervillain, Darkseid nods towards Nine Inch Nails with its ominous, churning bass-line and grungey synths as one of Boucher‘s regular collaborators, the Taiwanese artist Aristophanes, breathlessly raps over the apocalyptic soundscape.
Considering the album’s disconnected and sinister start, Delete Forever comes as a real bump in the road with an acoustic, folk-pop vibe which on first impressions feels a bit conventional and out of place.
However, after several listens, it reveals itself to be one of the best songs on the album. Well measured, emotive lyrics with an earthy melody that allows Boucher to play around with a more country twang to her voice that works surprisingly well.
But like on Art Angels, the lightness of the music is counterbalanced by the darkness of the subject matter.
The theme of loss haunts the album and Boucher is quoted as saying Delete Forever was inspired by the grief she felt losing friends and contemporaries to opiate misuse;
“Always down when I’m not up, guess it’s just my rotten luck to fill my time with permanent blue. But I can’t see above it, guess I fucking love it, but, oh, I didn’t mean to”
Arguably the strongest track on the album, Violence, also has a more Art Angels vibe.
It was released as the second single from the album in September 2019 and is a brilliantly produced, danceable slice of ethereal electro-pop and the stronger of the albums’ first two singles.
The single first, We Appreciate Power, also has its moments. A mix of nu-metal with a pulsing industrial beat and is a track that manages to feel both political and fantastical at the same time.
Boucher‘s ability to create a fusion of genres and styles, often in the same song, is such a revelation you can find yourself trying coin some sort of mash-up like ‘electronic dream-folk madrigal’ just to try and express something of its inspired strangeness.
The question many will ask then is the new album as good as Art Angels?
Well, inevitably whatever was released as a follow-up to the near-perfect Art Angels was going to have a tough gig so perhaps that isn’t a fair question.
No its not Art Angels, but Miss Anthropocene has still been very much worth the wait.
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