"A murky, meandering and sometimes suffocatingly dense record."

Last Friday, Grimes released her highly anticipated new album, Miss Anthropocene.

The lead up to the album has been a bit chaotic, to say the least. The album, the follow-up to her acclaimed 2015 record Art Angels, had been in the works since 2017, but delayed due to an apparently acrimonious dispute with her label — at one point, Grimes called her label, 4AD, “shit”, and claimed she was looking to release the record independently. She later apologised.

She also entered a period of newfound celebrity, thanks to her high-profile relationship with tech billionaire Elon Musk. It confused — and still confuses — her fans, who have known Grimes as the progressive artist with “anti-imperialist” emblazoned on her Twitter profile. Now, she’s the artist that defended Musk’s company Tesla against claims it was dismissing employees who were attempting to unionise.

But Grimes (born Claire Boucher) has never been one to acquiesce to people’s expectations — so when Miss Anthropocene dropped last Friday, it was predictably met with varied reactions. But overall, despite a pretty bumpy rollout, it looks as if Grimes the producer and artist has created another modern masterpiece. Here’s what critics about the album have been saying.

Grimes Is Addressing The End Of The World, In Her Way

Miss Anthropocene is, according to Grimes and The Guardian, “a work based around the idea of anthropomorphising climate change into the figure of a villainous goddess.” It’s a lot, to be sure — NME called it “a murky, meandering and sometimes suffocatingly dense record.”

So it’s a concept album, but a loose one, apparently. “[It] gives the distinct impression of being a conceptual work in the same way that Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a conceptual work,” writes The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis. “[That is], that its maker came up with a big, overarching idea that they then more or less abandoned after a couple of songs.”

Pitchfork — who awarded the album an 8.2 and the title of Best New Music — said much the same thing: “We’re left with a convoluted narrative about personifying climate change through a fictional cosmology of demons and villainesses giddily celebrating global warming as a force of good,” wrote Anupa Mistry.

Time also agreed that the character of Miss Anthropocene is never fully realised, unlike other heroes of concept albums like Janelle Monáe’s ArchAndroid alter ego Cyndi Mayweather. “Miss Anthropocene never coalesces as a character,” writes Judy Berman. “As a result, the album lacks the audacity of Grimes’ interviews about the album.”

Pitchfork also questioned Grimes’ motivations for the character and album concept — and whether or not Boucher is actually being sincere. “In this very specific political moment rendering climate crisis as dystopian aesthetic is privileged and indulgent, and perhaps even more frustrating given Grimes’ stage wink of an album title.”

When It’s Introspective, It’s Brilliant

What nearly every review agrees upon is that Miss Anthropocene excels when Grimes openly mines her own life for inspiration rather than concealing it within a weak alter ego.

“Miss Anthropocene seems inspired less by climate change than by recent events in the musician’s life,” posited The Guardian.”...If it’s a concept album at all, it’s about the toxicity of modern celebrity, not CO 2 emissions…And on those terms, Miss Anthropocene works remarkably well: for all the sci-fi theorising, the emotions at its centre feel prosaic, realistic and affecting.”

“When Grimes veers away from high concept toward examining intimate and relational forms of human erosion, Miss Anthropocene finds some clarity,” wrote Pitchfork.

It’s clear that love is on Grimes’ mind, and most reviews namecheck the curiously romantic track ‘Idoru’ as being a standout of the whole record: “[It] breaks with the album’s tradition of dark, smoggy layers in favour of something more hopeful and light,” wrote Rhian Daly in NME.

‘Delete Forever’, the album’s third track, written about the opioid crisis in the wake of Lil Peep’s death, is also called out as one of the most affecting: “The [track’s] few adornments — a churning loop, horn sounds that join the mix in a long outro — gorgeously offset the simplicity that surrounds them,” said Time.

As Always, The Production Is Exceptional

Grimes’ innovative and bold production is one of Miss Anthropocene’s biggest pulls: “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,” wrote Pitchfork’s Anupa Mistry.

On ‘Violence’, Mistry writes, Grimes gives one of her most “dynamic performances”: “Through gauzy overdubs and steady four-on-the-floor drums, she flips between whimpering and a snarl to delineate perspectives of an abusive relationship.”

Mistry highlights ‘4ÆM’ as also being a highlight, but The Guardian’s Petridis disagrees: “The Bollywood samples, bursts of lock-stepped drum’n’bass and one-note chorus of ‘4AM’ are more annoying than intriguing,” he writes. Time, meanwhile, calls it “giddy” and “chaotic”.

Ultimately, Miss Anthropocene is a record “stuffed with imagination and packed with beauty”, according to NME, and is “powerful and compelling”, according to The Guardian. Grimes, no matter what path she’s on, will always be interesting.