About

In 2011, Grimes was eager to say in an interview that she had “been studying pop stars.” Since emerging 10 years ago as a DIY ingénue out of Montreal’s freewheeling music scene, Claire Boucher has become known for her experimental production that often traded discernible lyrics for otherworldly and synthetic vocal textures. The words she sang didn’t figure into what made her music so fascinating—it was how she used her vocals to mimic whalesong or aliensong, a futurist reimagining of the transfixing voices of Enya and Mariah Carey, over irresistible melodies. Yes, Grimes always wanted to be a pop star, but on her own creative terms.

Miss Anthropocene is Grimes’ fifth album and her first as that bona fide pop star—the result of widespread acclaim for both 2012’s Visions and 2015’s addictive and upbeat Art Angels. With this new celebrity, accelerated by her relationship with tech billionaire Elon Musk, Grimes wants to talk about the climate crisis—although she doesn’t use that more accurate phrasing herself. “I wanted to make climate change fun,” she’s said in interviews and on her Instagram. Meaning, Grimes is using her preferred lenses of fantasy, villainy, and pop iconography to attempt to engage with reality.

The result is a record that’s more morose than her previous work, but no less camp. Art Angels was the result of a decade spent feverishly honing the tenets of songwriting, production, and engineering in order to show listeners who she was, and what she could do (be a pop star). 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. – Pitchfork