GRIMES 'Miss Anthropocene'

Much of GRIMES’ fifth LP is rooted in darkness, a visceral response to the state of the world and the death of her friend and manager Lauren Valencia. “It’s like someone who's very core to the project just disappearing,” she tells Apple Music of the loss. “I've known a lot of people who've died, but cancer just feels so demonic. It’s like someone who wants to live, who's a good person, and their life is just being taken away by this thing that can't be explained. I don't know, it just felt like a literal demon.” 'Miss Anthropocene' deals heavily in theological ideas, each song meant to represent a new god in what GRIMES loosely envisioned as “a super contemporary pantheon”—“Violence,” for example, is the god of video games, “My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)” the god of political apathy, and “Delete Forever” the god of suicide. The album’s title is that of the most “urgent” and potentially destructive of gods: climate change. “It’s about modernity and technology through a spiritual lens,” she says of the album, itself an iridescent display of her ability as a producer, vocalist, and genre-defying experimentalist. “I’ve also just been feeling so much pressure. Everyone's like, ‘You gotta be a good role model,’ and I was kind of thinking like, ‘Man, sometimes you just want to actually give in to your worst impulses.’ A lot of the record is just me actually giving in to those negative feelings, which feels irresponsible as a writer sometimes, but it's also just so cathartic.”