Album Review: Grimes’ Surprisingly Tame Return with 'Miss Anthropocene'

Grimes’ latest record is a great dark pop album, but its polish is disappointing when compared to her more ambitious previous works.

Written by Minnah Zaheer

Despite the fact that her last album was released nearly five years ago, Claire Boucher, known by her stage name Grimes (or “c”), has found many ways to stay busy. She’s collaborated with Janelle Monáe and LOONA, become the center of media attention due to her relationship with billionaire Elon Musk (including a recent pregnancy), and maintained her strange persona with bizarre interviews. Her highly-anticipated new record, Miss Anthropocene, went through a series of delays but has finally arrived. What could have been a culmination of all the chaos in Grimes’ life, however, is far more sanitized than any of her other work and falls flat as a result.

Grimes set herself apart with her earlier work, which often balanced synth-pop and rock and techno and plenty of other genre elements with ease. What made her so unique was her complete lack of restraint — as a producer, as well as a singer/songwriter, she employed experimental techniques to modify her voice and the instrumentation of her tracks in a way that only she could pull off.

Even though 2015’s Art Angels dipped into the mainstream waters (and Grimes herself has gone on record calling it a “stain” on her life and a “piece of crap”), she managed to inject just enough accessibility into her strange but captivating approach to music. But, because Miss Anthropocene plunges directly into creating music that will appease her newly expanding audience instead of attempting to balance creative expression with commercial appeal, it sacrifices too much of what made Grimes such an interesting artist at other points in her career.

Miss Anthropocene is still a solid record, though. Its first track, and one of its best, is “So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth,” a sprawling stream-of-consciousness with a friendly atmospheric beat propping up Grimes’ delicate but grounded vocals. The next track, “Darkseid,” features Japanese artist 潘PAN. It’s most representative of the sound that defines Grimes as an artist — a spoken-word English chorus punctuates hard and fast Japanese verses that burst into a dark and unsettling percussive melody. These two tracks set up a promising full record, showing two sides of Grimes that both remain faithful to her erratic image and hint at something more reflective of her new world.

Unfortunately, however, Miss Anthropocene is a concept record, and it’s an inauthentic and flat execution. In a now deleted Instagram post, Grimes said the album is about “an anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change (sic)” — an interesting perspective to hold as someone who took the word “anti-imperialist” out of her Twitter bio soon after she began dating Elon Musk, a billionaire whose environmentalism is often seen as performative. But while the concept behind the album feels fleshed-out and promising, the final product of all of that conceptualization feels hollow and generic.

The next track, “Delete Forever,” feels completely devoid of Grimes as an artist. A generic acoustic guitar song, it seems like something anyone could have recorded and fit into nearly any album. It’s a lyrically personal song about drug abuse and mental health, but it delivers little in the way of the post-apocalyptic intrigue of the “Goddess of climate Change” concept.

The record regains some footing with “Violence,” which features the DJ i_o and combines masterful mixing of a club beat with a synthesizer melody and Grimes’ vocal modulation to feel like something new. But it’s still not quite as dirty and perfectly imperfect enough — it feels flat and altogether too digestible to hold a candle to some of her best work, like “Kill v. Maim” off Art Angels or “Skin” off Visions.

The same goes for “4AÆM,” which brings back some of the chaotic darkness hinted at in “Darkseid” but fails to do much with it. “4AÆM” teases some of Grimes’ ability to capture listeners’ attentions by switching out traditional singing for almost amelodic runs to add more layers to the work, but all of the injections of innovation come in very small doses — to the point where they have the same effect as placebos. “New Gods” builds and builds, hinting at the possibility of Grimes losing the façade of holding herself together that she's kept on through the record, but it’s a fruitless wait as the release never comes.

Some of the most captivating instrumentation decisions come on “My Name Is Dark,” when a seemingly clean and conventional main melody complements by an almost cacophonous mix of off-key guitar and layered vocals. The song shifts keys a few times, almost as if it’s trying to keep up with itself, but it’s yet another technique with a lot of potential that ends up taking the safe route. “You’ll miss me when I’m not around” takes a similar turn as “Delete Forever” — both are great songs on paper, but lack any sort of personality beyond using synthetic sounds in the place of physical instrumentation. Grimes could have used these tracks as a place to write lyrics that convey the existence of her conceptual goddess, but instead she makes some mildly interesting production choices and leaves it at that.

“Before the Fever,” the penultimate track on the album, is constructed similarly to “So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth,” but without any of the atmospheric intrigue that makes “So Heavy” work. The former feels like it takes much more time to get through than the latter, despite the fact that “So Heavy” is twice the length of “Before the Fever.” “IDORU” is the third track to mimic this structure of replacing a chorus with a repeated musical element shifting ever so slightly over the duration of the song. There’s a reason this technique isn’t very common — it’s difficult to pull off translating a stream-of-consciousness into a song, and the verse-chorus structure is often more effective at conveying a specific narrative. “IDORU” neither conveys a narrative nor allows us a significant view into the head of the album’s goddess. It’s nearly seven minutes long, but it would’ve likely been just as effective at only three minutes.

Miss Anthropocene went through a series of delays and reconstructions before it got to its official release date, but one of the biggest disappointments in the final album is the exclusion of the track “We Appreciate Power” on the standard version (it’s on the deluxe version, which is the only one available on Spotify, but it’s not technically a part of the album). The track, which features HANA, perfectly encapsulates the two sides of Grimes: her powerful desire to use music as a weapon through which to push back against any and all traditions of music and womanhood, and her human need to make music that makes money. It’s just accessible enough to captivate a mainstream audience but still filthy and rebellious to capture the heart of Grimes’ strange persona. If the rest of Miss Anthropocene had followed suit in the tone set up by “We Appreciate Power,” it likely would’ve been much more successful.

Who would’ve thought that such a sudden thrust into the spotlight would’ve made someone like Claire Boucher, who draws black and red streaks on her forehead for a “day to day” look and gives some incredibly bizarre answers to simple questions, rope herself in? Maybe some restraint has a positive effect, as evidenced by her 2015 record Art Angels, but she pulled back so hard on Miss Anthropocene that she lost much of her connection to her music and reason for making it in the first place.

Grimes knows there’s something to rebel against, the seemingly inevitable apocalypse brought on by climate change. But rather than explore that hysteria through her music, she decided to create a record that shies away from raw emotion and innovation when it could’ve just as easily shattered expectations in both realms. As a result, her music ends up sounding like a series of B-sides written for a plethora of other artists rather than the poetry of destruction she had promised

REVIEWSAfterglow ATXFebruary 24, 2020