Miss Anthropocence
| Grimes
Miss Anthropocence
Miss Anthropocene (originally announced and stylized as Miss_Anthrop0cene) is the fifth studio album by Canadian musician Grimes, released on February 21, 2020 It was officially announced on March 19, 2019. The album's name is a pun on the feminine title "Miss", and the words "misanthrope" and "Anthropocene", a neologism popularised in the year 2000 by Paul J. Crutzen that was proposed to denote the current geological age the Earth is in. The album is a loose concept album about an "anthropomorphic goddess of climate change" inspired by Roman mythology and villainy. Miss Anthropocene is Grimes' final album on record label 4AD, to which she has been signed since 2012. The album is darker in style than Grimes' 2015 album Art Angels, containing inspiration from the sounds of nu metal and ethereal wave.-Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
Miss Anthropocene is the willful destruction of that self-conception. Grimes calls the sound “ethereal nu metal,” and the vibe is more honest to the pensive, sometimes cynical, public persona Grimes has shared in public over the last decade.
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Time
Grimes fueled anticipation with grand descriptions of Miss Anthropocene as a concept record named for an imaginary “death god” meant to personify climate change, on which every song would offer a different vision of death. She seemed to want to push buttons, claiming that she hoped to render environmental apocalypse thinkable by removing guilt from the public discourse around it—by making something “beautiful” and “fun” that would tackle humanity’s impending doom, in the form of “an evil album about how great climate change is.” Miss Anthropocene also reflects Grimes’ impressive evolution as a producer; by now she could bend and meld genres into breathtaking new shapes in her sleep.
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NME
Grimes takes on 21st Century celebrity, environmentalism and – most knotty of all – romantic love. This is a record stuffed with imagination and packed with beauty.
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Rolling Stone
Miss Anthropocene is no doubt a work of ambition, and Boucher’s aims at bringing further awareness to the climate crisis are noble.
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Independent
However hard it’s become to idolise Grimes as a public figure, her musical output has never been richer. Her third major label-album is case in point – it is an elastic, often beautiful work that finds glory in chaos.
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Stereogum
It’s a concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change: A psychedelic, space-dwelling demon/ beauty-Queen who relishes the end of the world. She’s composed of Ivory and Oil. Each song will be a different embodiment of human extinction as depicted through a Pop star Demonology.
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Sputnik Music
Miss Anthropocene takes everything about Grimes the musician – her uncanny ability to build a song out of parts no one ever thought to put together before, that idiosyncratic voice, her ear for a classic melody – and concisely packages it into her most penetrating record yet. That’s the beautiful dichotomy of Grimes, equal parts stressful, grating, and difficult, yet also powerful, incisive, and illuminating. There’s no naivete apparent here; Miss Anthropocene’s deeply personal, emotionally complicated nature proves Boucher can still cut through the bullshit when she wants to.
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411 Mania
Miss Anthropocene is a strange beast, made almost exclusively of the weakest material of Grimes' career to date, this climate change and depression epic proves to be an enthralling and intoxicating start-to-finish listen. The sounds of old have been polluted and poisoned by a unrelenting heaviness. Tracks clunk, clamber, pulse and drift as Grimes battles indifference and myriad distractions on this earth loving and planet burning LP.
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Jezebel
Much of Miss Anthropocene’s mash-up style evokes a soundtrack for a slick supervillain film, but the few gems come when Boucher works against that impulse and trades the sci-fi fan-fiction for a dose of actual human intimacy. A song like “You’ll miss me when you’re not around,” might seem basic compared to Miss Anthropocene’s more extreme textures, a jagged bassline anchoring a relatively understated track on which Boucher’s layered vocals are the star, but it makes for gothic pop perfection.
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Resident Advisor
On Miss Anthropocene, her haunting and ethereal singing serves a more direct purpose, evoking the nymphs, goddesses and demons that might wander this album's sci-fi world.
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All Music
Grimes' music has frequently sounded like pop music for the end of the world, so it makes sense that she leans into that mood on Miss Anthropocene. On her fifth album, she taps into mythology's power to make vast forces easier to comprehend by envisioning climate change as a demon-goddess pop star (as hinted at by the title's clever blend of "misanthrope" and "Anthropocene"). Humanizing the harm humans have caused to the environment by evoking deities of destruction and the singles chart is an intriguing concept that Grimes commits to completely. She trades the surreal, hi-def brightness of Art Angels for a murky mix of ethereal, nu-metal, and industrial-inspired sounds that call to mind a thoroughly polluted world.
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Crack
Grimes has consistently challenged our assumptions about what pop music is and what it can be. The best many artists can hope for is to hold a mirror up to a shared reality and reflect something meaningful, but on Miss Anthropocene, Grimes conceptualises a vision of the future accessible only through her art.
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DIY
Miss Anthropocene is undoubtably the singer's darkest album yet, the result perhaps of a rollercoaster half-decade or maybe just of an artist who's never really given two fucks about playing the radio-commercial game.
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Highsnobiety
Grimes released her anticipated new album, Miss Anthropocene. The project has received praise from critics and fans alike, and Twitter is already calling the album “legendary” and “iconic.”
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Irish Examiner
Miss Anthropocene is often bonkers, yes. But it is beautiful too — and by turns breathless, scary and irresistible. This is an LP that contains multitudes. Grimes goes scary cyberpunk on the clattering ‘Darksei’d, as over-the-top and baroque as you would expect of a song named after a comic book villain.
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WSJ
The star’s much-anticipated fifth album is a deeply rewarding record with a dark edge.
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Resident Advisor
Miss Anthropocene is a concept album about climate change, but you won't find any eco-sloganeering here. Grimes fast forwards past the apocalypse, using both music and visuals to evoke a world of sexy, simulated cyborgs and digital consciousness. "I, Poet of destruction, hereby declare that Global Warming is good," the Goddess Of Climate Change, AKA Miss Anthropocene, posted on the artist's Instagram in a villainous script. "Now is the time to burn twice as bright and half as long."
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SMH
Her fifth album is her darkest yet, introduced by the gorgeous downtempo ballad So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth. But it’s a shape-shifting journey, from Delete Forever, a country-tinged ditty featuring Wonderwall-like strumming, to 4ӔM, switching between gentle tribal rhythms and frenetic drum and bass beats, to My Name Is Dark, a nu-metal/emo-pop hybrid.
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Standard
As may be expected of anyone who mixes in such company, it arrives trumpeting some big ideas: anthropocene is the name some scientists propose for the epoch we now live in, in which humanity’s actions are causing huge changes to our climate and environment.
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The Times
A superb new album that is far weirder than her last one.
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COS
It’s clear that Grimes wanted to make something different than anything she’s done before. Miss_Anthrop0cene comes across as her most ambitious work yet, and that ambition pays off.
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MMS
Miss_Anthropocene and, in terms of sound, it will have a lot of songs like Violence on it. We shall see, but one thing is clear: Grimes is among the most original and gripping artists around.
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The Guardian
The actual album, now that it’s here, gives the distinct impression of being a conceptual work in the same way that Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a conceptual work: ie, that its maker came up with a big, overarching idea that they then more or less abandoned after a couple of songs.
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Rough Trade
Grimes releases her long awaited new album Miss Anthropocene on 4AD. Includes the singles So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth and Violence and featuring collaborations with 潘PAN and i_o.
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Brooklyn Vegan
Grimes sounds like she’s staying true to herself. It’s so easy to let those outside, non-music factors sway your opinion in the moment, but with an album as well-crafted as Miss_Anthropocene, I think this will hold up after all the chatter about Grimes has faded away.
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Contact Music
For her final release on 4AD Records, Grimes explores climate change with the concept album Miss Anthropocene. It's based around what she refers to as an "anthropomorphic goddess of climate change" and is a dark departure from the upbeat nature of 2015's Art Angels.
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Mystic Sons
The new single '4ÆM' follows on from a flurry of new material including the tracks 'My Name is Dark', 'So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth' and 'Violence', all of which will feature on her fifth LP 'Miss Anthropocene;, which is set to arrive on the 21st February via 4AD.
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Clash
Miss Anthropocene’ is a self-described concept album about “the anthropomorphic Goddess of Climate Change: A psychedelic, space-dwelling demon/beauty-Queen who relishes the end of the world”. This so-called goddess is (apparently) “composed of Ivory and Oil”, which is either a sugary placebo or genius creativity, befitting of 'Miss Anthropocene' - “anthropocene” is the current geological period of humanity’s domination of planet Earth, and in this context, a pun on the word “misanthrope” - someone distrusting of mankind . The record feels slick and polished, yet natural and unnatural. Like Grimes’ previous music, it’s a scary, ambient, and muddlingly beautiful mess.
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The Atlantic
Miss Anthropocene is a work of metal and rubber, factory clangs and ghostly screams, bullets with butterfly wings and empires of dirt. Sometimes Grimes ventures to sunnier or less macho ’90s subcultural sounds such as kandi raves and Lilith Fair.
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Loud and Quiet
In touting an album that promises to inject climate change with an irreverent sense of fun, Grimes has sold herself short by distilling both the absurdity and melancholy of end times into her most mature album to date.
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Magnetic
On Miss Athropocene, Grimes introduces “ethereal nu metal” sounds paired with her signature ethereal vocals and layered production that ranges from haunting to bubbly fun. Throughout the project, she crafts a genre-bending amalgamation of instrumentation ranging from the techno-influenced “Violence,” a collaboration track with i_o, to works like the bass-driven “Darkseid,” a record originally produced for Lil Uzi Vert.
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MSU Reporter
This album is all about “Miss Anthropocene,” the space dwelling goddess of global warming who wants nothing but the destruction of humanity. Her name, in fact, is a pun, a combination of “misanthrope,” someone who cares not for people and “anthropocene,” the geological time period in which humans have actively changed the climate. So, yeah, pretty heavy. The tracks included are Grimes’ attempt (and success) to portray the rise and making of this goddess, in a way reminiscent of a supervillian’s origin story. These tracks focus on individual things that, when put together, spell the end for humanity. When you combine that with the slightly nu-metal inspired, deep atmospheric production, you get something that is, like I’ve said three times now, heavy.
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Norman Records
Grimes is back with her first album in five years and third for 4AD. Miss Anthropocene contains the singles 'Violence' and 'So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth', which you may have heard on t'wireless. It is the follow up to the brilliant Art Angels - an album so good that former Normanite, Robin, gave it a 9/10 review back in 2015. Features collaborations with 潘PAN & i_o on some proper pop bangers.
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Paste Magazine
Only one Miss_Anthropocene track addresses man-made climate change and apocalypse in a deeply considered, impactful way: second single “Violence.” Here, over a beat that sounds like the long-lost disco sister to Art Angels highlight “Flesh Without Blood,” Boucher uses the push-pull of a toxic relationship (“You feed on hurting me, off hurting me”; “You wanna make me bad, and I like it like that”) to symbolize how human activity and climate change exist in a destructive, interdependent cycle. Such subtle, effective metaphors and narratives are sparse throughout Miss_Anthropocene, an album on which, the more Boucher leans into her most elliptical interests, the more her music threatens to become exactly what she fears: obsolete.
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NY Times
“Miss Anthropocene” is more somber. It’s full of dire scenarios, deep bass abysses and floating soprano refrains. The album, is a modern demonology or a modern pantheon where every song is about a different way to suffer or a different way to die. Miss Anthropocene is the goddess of climate crisis; the Anthropocene era is the epoch of human domination of the Earth.
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Global News
Miss Anthropocene serves as Grimes’ third and final release through the independent British record label 4AD and clocks in at 44 minutes, 40 seconds in length. It features ten original songs altogether, including the five already-released singles: Violence, My Name Is Dark, So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth, 4ÆM and Delete Forever.
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MTV
Miss_Anthropocene and it's "a concept album about the anthropomorphic goddess of climate Change."
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Pop Sugar
Miss Athropocene is Grimes's fifth studio album, joining her alien pop family of Art Angels (2015), Visions (2012), Halfaxa (2010), and Geidi Primes (2010). "Violence," "4 ÆM," and "New Gods" are a few songs from Miss Athropocene that have already imbued the internet with some high-octane electro-pop energy — the full album is available to stream now on all platforms.
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Telegraph
Climate change, psychedelia, human extinction and a love of the polar bear. The strangest star in art-pop has returned.
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This Song Is Sick
The fifth studio album from experimental indie pop artist, Grimes, is here and it’s a soundtrack fit for the end of the world. Miss Anthropocene, out via 4AD Records, is 15 tracks of hypnotic insanity that stretch and pull at your emotions but never let you leave. Throughout the album the soundscapes vary greatly, featuring drawn out angel-like vocals, to heavy nu-metal punk-like grooves.
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Phonica Records
Grimes releases her long awaited new album “Miss Anthropocene” on 21 Feb 2020 on 4AD. Includes the singles” So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth” & “Violence” and featuring collaborations with PAN & i_o.
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Turntable Lab
Grimes returns to 4AD with Miss Anthropocene, a concept album about a character she described in an instagram post as “the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change: A psychedelic, space-dwelling demon/ beauty-Queen who relishes the end of the world.”
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Oldies
Miss Anthropocene is primarily darker in style containing inspiration from the sounds of nu metal and ethereal wave compared to Art Angels' brighter and more upbeat sounds.
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Northern Transmissions
This record has long been touted as having a darker atmosphere than Art Angels and while off the top that does feel true, what also appears here isn’t claustrophobic in anyway at all. In fact, the song’s production has such a light touch that it truly does feel like it’s floating. “Darkseid (with 潘PAN)” continues this trend. With it’s bass-y beat and Grime’s effervescent vocals, it comes off a little like the 90s new age music of someone like Enya but when the hyperactive Japanese spoken word portion kicks in everything becomes singularly her own.
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Fact
Grimes has also revealed the album artwork for Miss Anthropocene, which she describes as depicting “the program the new gods use to edit and design the simulation.”
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Vanyaland
The inspiration comes from the current opioid crisis, as Grimes shared that she started writing the song upon the passing of Lil Peep in 2017.
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Taisawards
Miss Anthropocene features 10 tracks and has a release date of February 21, 2020. There are two versions of “So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth.” The “Art Mix” lasts six minutes, while the “Algorithm Mix,” essentially a radio edit, lasts just under four. “So Heavy” follows “Violence,” another single from the follow~up to 2015’s Art Angels. (The album title was previously styled Miss_ Anthrop0cene.)
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Reality Tv World
Miss Anthropocene features 10 tracks. Miss Anthropocene is Grimes' first studio album since Art Angels.
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Nylon
Grimes has revealed new visuals from her concept album Miss_Anthrop0cene for dark pop single "Violence," a collaboration with producer i_o, and we might just have our first real look at the Goddess of Climate Change she's become.
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Hypebeast
Miss Anthropocene, the fifth studio album from the Canadian artist is centered around a dark musical soundscape rooted in a deep electronic feeling. According to Grimes, the LP is directly inspired by a string of losses in her personal life must notably the passing of her friend and manager Lauren Valencia.
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Dazed
It’s a concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate change.
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Pop Market
Miss Anthropocene is primarily darker in style containing inspiration from the sounds of nu metal and ethereal wave compared to Art Angels' brighter and more upbeat sounds.
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Atwood Magazine
The intro is jarring, with Boucher’s vocals rebounding across the whole mix and no clear beat to grasp on to. Then the beat hits and the song ramps up into a medium tempo production soundscape with Boucher’s characteristic intangible vocals, punctuated by the addictive and almost cartoonishly girlish.
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Gay Times
Fans who prefer her synth-based music, before moving on to the ‘mostly ethereal nu-metal’ sound we last heard on the single We Appreciate Power featuring HANA – a song that celebrates the rise and takeover of artificial intelligence through the eyes of a pro-AI propaganda girl group.
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Happy
In many ways, Miss Anthropocene is the act of Grimes facing her inner-demons. The singer has described how her negative portrayal in the media, following the emergence of her relationship with Elon Musk, led her to feel villainised. Now, on Miss Anthropocene, Grimes embraces the role of villain. In reality, it’s an album about inner-catastrophe, just as much as it’s about the external.
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Elijahaura
Grimes starts the track off as what could easily slot into Halfaxa with a vocally mysterious, ethereal style. The track starts to build quickly however, and as the chorus hits Grimes’ lyrics are inaudible as a heavy drum and bass loop is blaring excitingly. Not being able to understand what the artist is saying is by no means a downfall- her voice is just another instrument that simply supports the maximalist production.
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Head Topics
This is an LP that contains multitudes. Grimes goes scary cyberpunk on the clattering ‘Darksei’d, as over-the-top and baroque as you would expect of a song named after a comic book villain. The Canadian meanwhile pulls off a surprisingly passable Taylor Swift impersonation on the semi-acoustic ‘Delete Forever’, her voice doing earnest battle with a strumming guitar. And she delivers an impassioned torch song closer ‘IDORU’, an epic that pairs her expressive coo with cascades of melody.
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The Eastern Echo
Grimes is pulling heavily on cyberpunk influences and seeks to explore the balance between womanhood and war.
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The Audio
Miss Anthropocene (originally announced and stylized as Miss_Anthrop0cene) is the fifth studio album by Canadian musician Grimes, released on February 21, 2020. It was officially announced on March 19, 2019. The album's name is a pun on the feminine title "Miss", and the words "misanthrope" and "Anthropocene", a neologism popularised in the year 2000 by Paul J. Crutzen that was proposed to denote the current geological age the Earth is in. The album is a loose concept album about an "anthropomorphic goddess of climate change" inspired by Roman mythology and villainy. Miss Anthropocene is Grimes' final album on record label 4AD, to which she has been signed since 2012. The album is darker in style than Grimes' 2015 album Art Angels, containing inspiration from the sounds of nu metal and ethereal wave.
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Daily
Miss Anthropocene” is more somber, full of dire scenarios, deep bass abysses and floating soprano refrains. Grimes doesn’t make her songs depend on the words. The nervous energy, dread, anxiety, death wish and poppy nihilism are also in the sound of her music. Throughout “Miss Anthropocene,” personal and societal disasters seem imminent.
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One News Page
However hard it's become to idolise Grimes as a public figure, her musical output has never been richer. Her third major-label album is case in point – it is an elastic, often beautiful work that finds glory in chaos.
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Hollywood News
While “Anthropocene” can be loosely grouped with recent innovative pop albums from artists like Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek, Grimes is following a different path. Where Charli blends discordant, confrontational sounds with pure pop and Polachek twists melodies into intricate shapes, Grimes’ music is hazier, so drenched with echo and effects that it can take repeated listens for some of the songs to emerge — and good luck trying to decipher most of the lyrics, which veer between dark missives about doom and drugs, seeming love songs, a borderline suicide note.
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Spin
Miss_Anthropocene is a concept album, named after a character she described in an Instagram post as “the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change: A psychedelic, space-dwelling demon/ beauty-Queen who relishes the end of the world.
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Istandard
Canadian musician, Grimes, drops her fifth studio album called Miss Anthropocene. The album’s title is a play on the feminine title “Miss”, and the words “misanthrope” and “Anthropocene.
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Celeberazzi
Miss_Anthropocene is a concept album about the anthropomorphic goddess of climate Change. It's about a space-dwelling, apocalypse-fetishizing demon.
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