Grimes Returns with Miss Anthropocene 'Rave Edition'
In a follow-up to Grimes’ critically acclaimed album Miss Anthropocene – a concept album from the perspective of a nihilistic goddess of climate change – the artist has released Miss Anthropocene (Rave Edition), which features remixes of her songs by the likes of ANNA, Channel Tres and Modeselektor. The original album title is a play on words ‘Misanthrope’, a hater of humanity, and ‘Anthropocene’, the term used to describe our era of climate change. If the album sounds terrifying, that’s because it is.

The ANNA remix of ‘So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth’ is perhaps a fitting song to start the album with as its electronic arrangements make you feel as if you’re in a rave but also, at times, like you are deep underwater. Other stand out tracks include the REZZ remix of ‘Violence’, which descends into drum n bass and intensifies the lyrics: ‘I’m, like, begging for it, baby / Makes you wanna party, wanna wake up / It’s violence.’ The track is both weighted by deep bass and elevated by Grimes’ high-octane voice, and the song leaves you levitating somewhere in the middle.
Another memorable track is ‘4ÆM’, which is unchanged from the original and includes a sample from the Bollywood film Bajirao Mastani. The track opens with a tropical forest soundscape before collapsing into an oddly threatening pick-up line (‘I’m out late at 4 AM/ He says, “How’s the weather, baby? How’ve you been?”/ You’re gonna get sick, you don’t know when’).
The Things You Say remix of ‘You’ll miss me when I’m not around’ is punctuated by sharp inhales and chipmunk-pitch singing – and is by far the most bubblegum pop track of the album. Elsewhere, the Julien Bracht remix of ‘My Name is Dark’ gives the song a trance-house make over as Grimes growls ‘I don’t need sleep/ That’s what the drugs are for’. The Modeselektor remix of ‘IDORU’, which features recordings of birdsong, also evokes the feeling of the whole Rave Edition album, that you’re in a reverse Garden of Eden; a kind of garden of extinction.
If the album lags a bit in the middle, ‘We Appreciate Power’ is a fantastic, momentous techno nightmare to end on. As ever, Grimes’ vocals weave in and out of the chaos, as the artist’s menacing, electric feminine frequencies radiate throughout Miss Anthropocene (Rave Edition). This is perhaps what makes the album so exciting: it dares to sound almost holy in spite of the destruction. The result is that it seems as if the world is ending to the sound of angels.
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