To hear Grime's fifth full-length Miss_Anthropocene is a bit like standing at the annual SXSW World Conference in Austin, USA and listening to the dystopian prophecies of all future scholars. At the same time. At maximum volume.
About a world where mass unemployment follows in the wake of society's automation and AI. And how the mass abuse of opiate medicine comes next. And in the middle of it all - a complete environmental breakdown. So too in social media.
Some of these panic bodies are thrown into Grime's symphonic cathedrals of soft techno, industrial metal, art music, punk, choirs and / or infectious hit pop with her typical bright, light, sometimes troubled voice in the center.
That's all at once. Of all. From an artist who comes from a streaming generation where music history - and perhaps, in her case, even world history - floats freely? What is, now and then? Who cares about the answer?
Grimes has always seen his present and future . Maybe it was no wonder that I interviewed her for the first time at an event like SXSW? The year was 2012. She was just about to break through with the third album "Visions" with the help of the single track Oblivion after touring with Lykke Li.
Oblivion was about something she had unfortunately experienced. About the fear of sexual abuse by men. It was celebrated five years before #MeToo. Selected for the second best song of the decade by the music medium Pitchfork. Since then, Claire Boucher, whose name she is really called (though actually she is now renamed C, she hates all her former names, including the artist name), has continued to grow.
Five years ago, the last album, Art Angels, came in which, in connection with a pop-historical-era move from an alternate Montreal to Los Angeles, left some of its more experimental pages to highlight sunrise, umbrella drinking and baldness.
On the new Miss_Anthropocene it is darker. The album is a concept where she sees each track as a story in itself. Ten examples of how humanity will suffer and be exterminated.
One of them is the prevailing opioid epidemic . She sings it to acoustic guitar on Taylor Swiftiga, Wonderwall-like Delete Forever. Grimes wrote the same night she heard about Lil Peep's death. On another - Before the fever - she proclaims: "This is the sound of the end of the world"
She has drawn much inspiration from the Roman war god Mars. By embodying the climate fight, making it less guilt-ridden, more visible, meaner and more fun when she dresses in a god-like figure, naked, only dressed in iron and oil.
But also their own non-existent privacy has been recorded. Since she started dating superconductor Elon Musk, Grimes has become renowned and then slandered by colleagues and fans in an unorthodox, authentic, post-factual way. A role that obviously worries her a lot.
The big question many people ask is if Miss_Anthropocene can give her life as an artist back? If she can be anyone other than the mother of the battery-builder's sixth child and then colonize Mars (the planet in this case, then - Musk talked about moving there, just that, SXSW this year)?
Well, play the divinely beautiful opening track So heavy I fell through the earth or equally adorable, slightly madonna-like Darkseid and Violence. Or take both the incredible and uneasy euphoric forest scene in 4ÆM.
Or pick just about any other track (it loses a bit in some of the latter part of the song list before the finale with paradisiacal "IDORU" with its thoughts on the pop star of the future) anytime on this little unlikely album that may be both black and scary, but also wonderfully and well thought out in the details.
Grimes has not only made his best album but probably a long-lived one that captures the fate issues of our time. It is both dark and scary but at the same time so adorable beautiful that you almost look forward to the end.