On her conceptual fifth album, Grimes ditches the colourful pop facade of 2015’s sublimely manic Art Angels and delivers a frightening look at the many shades of human extinction in beautiful washes of nu-metal and cold electronica.
It is an elastic, often beautiful work that finds glory in chaos.
Boucher's production prowess, beautifully complex and ambitious songwriting, is self-evident on Miss Anthropocene.
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.
By consolidating the stylistic elements of her previous two works, Miss_Anthrop0cene lies at the intersections of Grimes’ past experiments while forging something entirely new to her discography.
Miss Anthropocene is not quite as brilliantly weird as its predecessor, but is certainly compelling enough to maintain Grimes' status as one of the most fascinating pop stars on the planet.
Her fifth album is her darkest yet.
Miss Anthropocene is a deep, dark trip – shame the climate crisis bit isn’t also part of Grimes’s wild imagination.
She has described herself as a post-internet artist, her musical identity forged in a medium where genre distinctions have collapsed, and Miss Anthropocene is another almost bewildering exercise in eclecticism.
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.
It doesn’t add much to the climate change debate, but as a representation of what it’s like when fame turns dark, it is powerful and compelling.
On an album as sonically diverse as Miss Anthropocene, the most significant thread that holds it all together, more than the topic of climate change or its creator’s personal relationships, is Boucher’s wild imagination and commitment to experimenting with her sound.
There’s the feeling that, behind her mask of the anthropomorphic goddess of climate change, maybe, just maybe, this is Grimes’ most honest and reflective album yet.
The record at large is mostly untainted by all this noise – a sparkling collection of sick sad world pop, with Boucher's stun-gun talent stark and unmarred at its centre.
Miss Anthropocene is a far darker record than anything Grimes has ever released, and that darkness arguably holds it back from being truly great.
After a career of anything-goes audaciousness — 2015’s Art Angels being her zenith in both cases — Miss Anthropocene ironically comes off as her most subdued LP where anyone might have expected it to be bacchanalian feast.
Miss Anthropocene is often fascinating and defies expectations in ways that still fit her always thought-provoking aesthetic.
‘Miss Anthropocene’ is undoubtedly the singer’s darkest album yet.
By the end of the record, you could indeed feel completely powerless and submissive to Grimes’s new concept and change in sound.
This sounds like the logical followup to 2015's Art Angels. It's a little darker and heavier than that prior record's vibrant palette, but it still has everything we've come to expect from Grimes.
Grimes' fifth album Miss Anthropocene is uneven, gloomy and baffling, and yet contains enough of her magic to remain an enthralling listen.
Ironically, you may wind up wishing that her scorched Earth was a bit more, well, fun.
What the album actually has to say about climate change is often lost under the admittedly beautiful, meticulously composed wreckage.
If Art Angels flamboyantly tossed pop, dance and nu-metal sounds onto a wall like a Jackson Pollock creation and rendered its characters ... with Bruegel-esque detail, then Miss_Anthropocene often paints in broad, unengaging strokes.
After five years’ wait, Grimes’ fifth record has arrived with a heavier shift toward slower, darker jams from the madcap electric pop that captured hearts on her last album, Art Angels.
Miss Anthropocene’s less interesting musicality, particularly the dull thud of its beats, draws attention to the brickwalling and make the whole experience that much less enjoyable.
For better or worse—mostly worse—Miss Anthropocene sounds as if it was made by an untrained Grimes A.I.
so heavy i fell thru is gorjus but like it doesnt need to be 6 mins. only critique with this album cus the rest of it is legit perfection and IDORU is the yearniest song of all time
Acho que isto é um bom exemplo quando digo que as pessoas daqui não sabem ouvir música.
Grimes tem seu mérito, ela produziu tudo, ela tem ideias interessantes circulando, mas nenhuma faixa consegue soar completamente boa.
Ela fica miando, isso mesmo!Miando em boa parte das faixas, gemendo ou falando.Seu timbre é muito parecido com o da Melanie,mas ela não consegue trazer algo interpretativo e se esconde em muitos efeitos vocais que não ajudam a ... read more
1 | So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth (Art Mix) 6:08 | 84 |
2 | Darkseid 3:44 | 72 |
3 | Delete Forever 3:57 | 85 |
4 | Violence 3:40 with i_o | 88 |
5 | 4ÆM 4:30 | 88 |
6 | New Gods 3:15 | 80 |
7 | My Name is Dark (Art Mix) 5:56 | 89 |
8 | You'll miss me when I'm not around 2:41 | 81 |
9 | Before the Fever 3:37 | 76 |
10 | Idoru 7:13 | 82 |
#2 | / | Slant Magazine |
#7 | / | The Forty-Five |
#8 | / | Gaffa (Sweden) |
#8 | / | The Wild Honey Pie |
#9 | / | Gorilla vs. Bear |
#9 | / | TIME |
#13 | / | Sputnikmusic |
#14 | / | Exclaim! |
#14 | / | The A.V. Club |
#15 | / | The Independent |