Miss Anthropocene

There’s brilliance here, but it’s when the album slows down that it becomes transcendent.

Her ultra-high, almost kewpie-doll-like voice — which sounds autotuned even when it’s not — and previous tendency toward cheerleaderesque hooks wore thin quickly and threatened to become creative dead ends. Here, she’s found ways to reshape and reinvent them — and in the process, open up a whole new realm for herself as an artist.

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.

Miss_Anthrop0cene is the perfect Grimes record for 2020, delving into topical themes such as climate change with an eclectic mix of genres. It’s certainly her darkest, most ambitious project yet, and it works on nearly all levels.

Miss Anthropocene thrills when it reveals a refined, linear evolution of Grimes’ long-standing interest in rave nostalgia and alluring pop music from around the world.

Ultimately an excellent record. Where the message is muddied, thankfully the music is often, simply put, beautiful.

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. [May 2020, p.105]

Miss Anthropocene is a deep, dark trip – shame the climate crisis bit isn’t also part of Grimes’s wild imagination.

The result is a challenging exploration of the conflicting boundaries and boundlessness of personhood, technology, and society.

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.

This celebratory nihilism defines an album that's sometimes dark and moody, sometimes manic and fun. There are familiar moments of quirky guitar pop ("Delete Forever," "You'll Miss Me When I'm Not Around"). More exciting is when Grimes goes big on reverb and club-sized beats.

Miss_Anthrop0cene is great. And much of what makes it great are the unavoidable, personal obsessions that Boucher has always carried with her: science fiction, nerd culture, Eastern scales, loop-pedal musicality, and an uncool love for the kind of bass you'd expect to be blasting out at Burning Man.

It’s a record stuffed with imagination and packed with beauty. It’s also a fitting next step for an artist who’s built her reputation as someone who refuses to keep in step with the rest of the world.

Miss Anthropocene seems a more personal project than its advance billing suggested. 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.

It is a bold concept for a dazzling album, although I suspect most listeners would be hard pressed to make much sense of it without Boucher’s interpolations.

The record feels slick and polished, yet natural and unnatural. Like Grimes’ previous music, it’s a scary, ambient, and muddlingly beautiful mess.

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.

Even if it's not always as vivid as some of her earlier albums, 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, 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-friendly commercial game.

The real surprise of Miss Anthropocene is that it actually sounds like a fairly standard Grimes album. She's a become a controversial public figure whose whole persona is like one big multimedia art project, so this is a welcome return to her wheelhouse.

When Grimes's impeccable production skills are given a chance to shine, the ideas behind Miss Anthropocene's slow-burners begin to come into focus.

Miss Anthropocene is an uneven record, and one that arrives with considerable baggage that threatens to turn it into a punching bag. But Grimes' proven abilities as a producer win out. There are superfluous, overlong passages, especially when the brightness in her music drains away.

Miss Anthropocene is no doubt a work of ambition, and Boucher’s aims at bringing further awareness to the climate crisis are noble. ... Yet what the album actually has to say about climate change is often lost under the admittedly beautiful, meticulously composed wreckage. By the album’s end, Boucher has abandoned the muddled villainous pretext in favor of her own utopian fantasies.

Where these two songs [“Darkseid” and “4ÆM”] burst with fervor, Miss_Anthropocene’s other tracks often stumble and limp.

For an artist whose past two albums were as impeccably curated as they were produced, the non-cohesiveness of Miss Anthropocene is bit of a disappointment, in spite of the record’s highlights.