RePlay: ‘Miss Anthropocene’ is ‘the sound of the end of the world’

Content warning: drug abuse

Five years ago, the world seemed to be ending. Climate change was in the news with another record hottest year, global politics were at the fore with major elections and a disease called COVID-19 was beginning to spread. 

Amidst this chaos, Canadian singer-songwriter-producer Grimes, née Claire Boucher, was going through somewhat of an apocalypse of her own. She had recently become pregnant by tech billionaire Elon Musk, propelling her to previously unthinkable levels of fame — and disdain. Life as she knew it, like the world itself, was seemingly collapsing around her.

She coped, and responded, like many artists do, with an album. In February 2020, she released “Miss Anthropocene” a tragic, disturbing and intriguing look into the psyche of someone who knows they and their world have irrevocably changed.

The title is an amalgamation of “misanthrope,” meaning someone extremely anti-social, and “anthropocene,” the scientific name for the age of man. Grimes saw the negative, uncharacteristic portrayal of herself as a combination of the two and decided to explore this perception. 

“If I’m stuck being a villain, I want to pursue villainy artistically,” the artist told Crack magazine.

The album fittingly begins on its darkest notes. “So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth” and “Darkseid” are heavy, industrial mechanisms exploring Grimes’ thoughts on newfound motherhood and society in general, the gloomy instrumentals reflecting her combative feelings..

The villainous facade crumbles on the third track, “Delete Forever” — a clunky compounding of country, pop and her trademark electronica. The track details, in heartbreaking honesty, the recent deaths of several friends to drug overdoses. 

“Innocence was fleeting like a season / Cannot comprehend, lost so many men / Lately all their ghosts turn into reasons, and excuses,” she sings.

This honest bleakness only rears its head once more, on “You’ll miss me when I’m not around,” where Grimes swears vengeance for herself. Both songs serve as a distressing look into Grimes’ psyche obsessing over death, be it her friends’ or her own, and admittedly being unable to cope.

The songs feel as unprocessed as her emotions — teetering between genres and ideas, never resting on one sound for long, sonically spinning into the chaotic disarray her life and world had become.

Perhaps the murkiest track is single “My name is dark,” which sees Grimes at some of her most comically villainous over reverb-drenched guitar loops, spitting one-liners like, “Imminent annihilation sounds so dope.”

Even the upbeat songs leaning heaviest on pop — “Violence” featuring i_o (who died eight months after the album’s release) and “4ÆM” — are betrayed by their disturbing lyrics. 

The enrapturing, rolling techno beat in “Violence” tries its best to distract from Grimes’ sardonic pleas for punishment.

“4ÆM,” invoking M.I.A’s modern epic “Bad Girls,” features Grimes flying incomprehensibly into her highest register in the verses, before slamming on the gas for the chorus. Sampling Bollywood’s Bajirao Mastani, Grimes, half-laughingly, recounts a night out, which includes one of her many eerie prophecies — “You’re gonna get sick, you don’t know when.”

“New Gods” and “Before the fever” expand this semi-prophetic vein, tapping into Grimes’ potential to haunt the listener.

Grimes surrenders entirely on the mournful “New Gods.” “I pray, but the world burns,” she sings, leading her to search for a deity who can give her what she wants — although that want is unclear.

“Before the fever” was described by Grimes as “literal death” in an interview with Apple Music, featuring a cathartic climax that’s best described by one of its lyrics, beautifully sung in her rarer, lower register — “this is the sound of the end of the world.”

After this ego death, “Idoru” sees Grimes reckoning with herself in a final acceptance of her reviled fate. 

Chirping birds and sweet synths feel like waking up in a beautiful garden as Grimes recounts a doomed love story.

“Look, I say / As my fingers tremble / This is who I am / And you / Fingers trembling too / Understand,” Grimes confesses in the pre-chorus

The song inevitably begs the listener to wonder who the subject could be, and the bridge gives a hint — “You made my all-time favorite music.”

After an album of self-destruction, and a literal ego death, the heavenly atmosphere and tragically beautiful lyrics of “Idoru” point to more than just a standard romance.

This is, after everything, a profound expression of self-acceptance.

Amidst the burning ruins of her world and life, Grimes forgives herself for choosing to play the beautiful game of life.

“Think we finally lose,” Grimes, or Claire, admits. “But I adore you.”

RePlay is a recurring music review column.