Grimes' 'Miss Anthropocene' Is the Soundtrack of Dystopia

Back in November of last year, pixie-pop princess turned anime villain Grimes announced her fifth LP; 'an evil album about how great climate change is.' The title is a wordplay of 'misanthrope' and 'Anthropocene', a scientific term that refers to the geological epoch we're currently living in. Meshed together, they coronate the deity of global warming; Miss Anthropocene.

This isn't the first time Grimes has dipped into dystopian themes. The video for her first viral hit, Genesis, channelled Hieronymus Bosch's 'Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things' in a Sailor Moon-meets-Gaultier desert setting. For Art Angels, Flesh Without Blood featured a Marie Androidette; 'let them eat flesh'; a soul-vacuum dancing around empty mansions, exposing the vapidity of wealth. The follow-up single Venus Fly saw a winged Grimes doused in oil-spill, clocked onto the curiosity of a robotic camera. Janelle Monae, meanwhile, oozed cyberpunk goddess, as the pair collided in hyperspace to decry the male gaze. And back in November 2018, Grimes released We Appreciate Power with HANA; a metallic celebration of AI uprising.

Although the album isn't set to be released until February 2020, four tracks have been dropped already. The first was Violence, co-produced with i_o. At first listen, it's as if Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence was remixed in a femme tech-fused future and sent back in time. However, once given the context of the album, it unravels as the voice of Mother Earth herself:

The relationship between humanity and our home planet is undeniably complex. Here in Violence, Grimes satirises the role of nature as a patriarchal archetype; the passive woman, the motherly caregiver, from whom we can take and take and take and give nothing in return. Though her voice is almost sarcastic; 'I am like, begging for it baby', a hark back to Nirvana's R*pe Me. As if the Earth asked for this.

It didn't ask for Grimes to fall through it either, but So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth, the second single, is hardly a threat. It's the calm before the solar storm. Perhaps our planet would welcome such a soothing. So Heavy is a Mad Max lullaby; an electric orchestral synth-scape glittered with dragged-out 'ooohs' and 'aaaahs', and serves as a welcome contrast to the industrial warfare of We Appreciate Power, a sound many had assumed to expect a full album of:

But the artistic alter Grimes assumes for her nu-metal sound, Dark, still makes an appearance. Her character bursts into chaotic life on My Name Is Dark:

From the lyrics, it seems she works in willing coalition with Miss Anthropocene. She's 'the girl who plays with fi-yahhhhhh', who doesn't need sleep because 'that's what the drugs are for'. 'Unfuck the world?' - nah, 'imminent annihilation sounds [so] dope'. This is a declaration of war upon humanity, but Dark didn't start it. She's just happy to oblige.

Then there's 4ÆM; pure boss battle music; the kind of heart-racing rhythm that carries you into the final fight with some infanticidal sun queen, deep in the womb of the Amazon. It's full throttle; an anarchic mesh of nervousness and excitement - the countdown to end of the world.

The album rocks steady between moments of oceanic calm and deep-sea panic. Delete Forever is an acoustic mesh of guitar, synths and vocals that harkens back to the moments of reflection on Art Angels. Before the fever sounds like underwater hearing. It's an audio snapshot of humanity's final moments; peaceful acceptance of our own destruction before we sink beneath rising sea levels.

Grimes' back/forth between celestial-faerie synths and anarchistic high-octane nightmare fuel is, in itself, a sci-fi warring between two polarities. The videos she creates to animate the narrative of her music serve as fun-house mirror reflections of her internal mind. And what's especially unique is how in control she is of her work. She's a producer, director, singer/songwriter, and artist. She doesn't condense herself into a single mould, continually challenging the ideals of the 'one-dimensional' woman. A quick skip through concert footage proves this also, Grimes glides with glossy ease between live mixing, singing and performing, darting in triangular formation across the stage with an extraordinary degree of energy and finesse.

What's equally impressive is Grimes' ability to rise above 'cancel culture'; a toxic ideology where upset fans clump together behind hashtags to verbally beat a 'problematic' person back into irrelevance. Grimes' crime? Dating divisive capitalist Elon Musk.

'I didn't realise everyone thought I was such a by-the-books socialist,' she told Crack's Kevin EG Perry. 'My politics are literally insane. I'll probably go down for it in the end.' While celebrities and politics have always intertwined, it's never been as important or explicit as it is today. In an era of socio-economic and strife, it's become a necessity for celebrities, especially musicians, to pledge some political allegiance, regardless of whether they write hymns of anarchy or bops about ass-jiggling. One wobble and you're out.

With Miss Anthropocene, Grimes is self-styling herself as the villain, so social media needn't bother. She's the architect of her own dystopia; a world where human extinction is imminent, and AI will reign. Her characters could easily flesh out the gothic post-worlds of science-fiction. From rococo robots to the goddess of natural disaster, she channels her personas through the widely accessible medium of music, reintroducing the sci-fi genre to a new, and very different, kind of audience.