Miss Anthropocene/Critical Reception

• Album
• Critical Reception
• Physical Release

Album

Critical Reception

Physical Release

Miss Anthropocene debuted at number 1 on Billboard's Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart and at number 32 on the Billboard 200, with 19,000 equivalent album units, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. It also debuted at No. 10 on the Official UK Albums chart, becoming her first top 10 album in the United Kingdom.

Critical Reception

Miss Anthropocene received positive reviews from music critics upon its release. On review aggregator website Metacritic, which assigns media a normalized score out of 100 based on reviews from mainstream publications, the album has a score of 79 based on 27 critic reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews".

Reviewing Miss Anthropocene for The Independent, Adam White deemed it a "triumph" and praised the wide range of sounds explored on the album, saying that it "operates much like a greatest hits record". He directed praise to the album's "transcendent" slower songs, particularly "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth" and "You'll Miss Me When I'm Not Around". Anupa Mistry of Pitchfork wrote that the album successfully builds upon "Grimes' long-standing interest in rave nostalgia and alluring pop music from around the world", despite expressing reservations about its "rendering [of] climate crisis as dystopian aesthetic". NME journalist Rhian Daly described the climate change concept as "fragmented ... rather than being a unifying thing to tie every song neatly together", while praising Miss Anthropocene's mix of sounds, pointing to the "eerie" "New Gods" and "intergalactic rave-pop" of "Violence" as highlights. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian found it to be an effective commentary on the "toxicity of modern celebrity" as opposed to climate change, adding that "on those terms, Miss Anthropocene works remarkably well: for all the sci-fi theorising, the emotions at its centre feel prosaic, realistic and affecting". AllMusic critic Heather Phares concluded that despite being less "vivid" than her earlier work, the album is "often fascinating and defies expectations in ways that still fit her always thought-provoking aesthetic".

Claire Shaffer of Rolling Stone commended Grimes' intentions but found that "what the album actually has to say about climate change is often lost under the admittedly beautiful, meticulously composed wreckage." Grant Sharples of Consequence of Sound called the album "her darkest, most ambitious project yet". Lisa Wright of DIY also described the album as Grimes' darkest album. Paste's Max Freedman was more critical and wrote that Miss Anthropocene "veers on incoherent" due to its lack of "subtle, effective metaphors and narratives". Sputnikmusic stated that "Miss Anthropocene takes everything about Grimes the musician...and concisely packages it into her most penetrating record yet." Louise Bruton of The Irish Times described the album as a "frightening look at the many shades of human extinction in beautiful washes of nu-metal and cold electronica." In 2021, Pitchfork included the album in their "Rescored" list, adjusting its original score of 8.2 to a 6.9, with Madison Bloom claiming that Grimes "sounds like a carbon copy of herself" on it.