Nearly five years have passed since Grimes ended her last album Art Angels with a reminder: If youre looking for a dream girl, Ill never be your dream girl. Few people seemed to grasp that lyric. Trigger happy at the sight of one of its favorite artists getting sucked into the absurdity of the late 2010s, music media (The FADER included) spun her hiatus into a saga: When Grimes mentioned new music, she was a headline. When Grimes expressed discontent about the industry, she was a headline. When Grimes started dating a technocrat, she was a headline and a class traitor and that was just the beginning. By the time would-be lead single We Appreciate Power dropped, nearly everyone seemed to doubt her intentions.

Rather than dial back those suspicions, on Miss Anthropocene, Claire Boucher plays with the idea that she just might be the villain we seem to want her to be. Conceptually, the album loosely emulates the software that the new gods use to design the simulation, pictured on its cover. Its coded in the space where self destruction and global destruction entwine, with an emphasis on the former. Each of the albums most explicitly pop moments are barbed with hedonism: the precision lash and sting of Violence, the Bollywood vertigo of 4M.

She punctuates My Name Is Dark with insomniac screams and then sings about listening to Smashing Pumpkins while watching over the city with bloodshot eyes. When she coos about imminent annihilation sounding so dope, it reads as both a mission statement for the album and a potent distillation of everything weve demanded from Grimes. Its pop excellence written from the brink of insanity.

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Grimes plays the villain we want her to be on Miss Anthropocene - The FADER