Grimes’s forthcoming album, Miss Anthropocene, is coming sometime in February, but she’s already ready to talk about elements of making it (such as the arduous, but also freeing process of making a record alone).
She says, for example – in a recent interview for Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 radio show – that “it’s never quite as creative” working with other artists, “because you try really embarrassing stuff when you’re by yourself”.
That hasn’t stopped her trying to collaborate with other artists in the past, such as Lil Uzi Vert, who asked her to produce an EP for him, but apparently he never downloaded the WeTransfer link she sent. “I was like dude I spent two weeks on this,” she says. “It hurt my feelings.”
Back to the new album, Grimes also describes the recently-released track “4ÆM” as an “engineering nightmare” and says: “the whole making of the album was a really negative, aggressive, isolating experience.”
“People have really reacted negatively against the thesis of this album,” she adds, “because I think they think it’s dangerous to propose an idea like… you know I said I wanted to make climate change fun.”
By the sounds of it, no one has to worry much about the new album being too much fun, though, as the singer/producer goes on to talk about the “new phenomenon” of humans being able to “eradicate our species ourselves.”
“I think it’s actually only been since the nuclear bomb, and then climate change and in the future possibly AI...”
Of course, Grimes probably has a lot of conversations about the potentially apocalyptic future of AI, given that her boyfriend, Elon Musk, has warned that it’s an “existential risk” (though he’s promised that he won’t develop killer robots himself).
Watch more clips from Grimes’s Zane Lowe interview below.
