Everything Grimes Has Done Since Her Last Album, 2015’s Art Angels

Grimes has announced that her long-teased follow-up to 2015’s Art Angels will be called Miss_Anthrop0cene. Though the songwriter-producer born Claire Boucher has not yet given the project a formal release date, she explained that it will be “a concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change.” In addition to prepping her new record, Grimes’ hands have been full with fantastical music videos, ongoing collaborations alongside her global crew, soundtracks and theme songs, and, uh, that whole Elon Musk situation. Let’s revisit the action-packed period following Art Angels.

December 24, 2015: Just a month and a half after Art Angels, Grimes shares a previously unreleased track called “Fifteen Minutes To,” which she says on Tumblr “probably” pre-dates her second album, 2010’s Halfaxa.

January 19, 2016: Grimes drops her cyberpunk fantasy of a “Kill V. Maim” video, directed by herself and her brother Mac.

January 23, 2016: On tour in Seoul, Grimes busts out a rendition of “Ave Maria,” which she previously noted “might be one of [her] all-time favorite songs.” She later turns the cover into a full-fledged electro suite alongside her most frequent collaborator as of late, the rising synth-pop artist HANA.

April 16, 2016: During her Coachella performance, Grimes subtly endorses Bernie Sanders by flashing an illustration of him on the big screen behind her.

May 9, 2016: Grimes debuts a new country-glam video for “California,” featuring an alternate version of the Art Angels single and guest-stars including Purity Ring’s Megan James and model Eric Cheng.

August 3, 2016: Considering Grimes’ penchant for superhero cosplay in her imagery, it comes as no surprise when she contributes a new song to the Suicide Squad soundtrack, titled “Medieval Warfare.”

August 12, 2016: Grimes, along with Noah “40” Shebib and Imagine Dragons, announce their roles in curating the soundtrack for the “NBA 2K17” video game. Between a song from Boucher and many from the OVO camp, the playlist ends up being very Canadian.

October 5, 2016: Grimes unveils a whopping seven music videos, which she directed with her brother and shot while touring Europe. Four come from songs off Art Angels: “World Princess Part II,” “Butterfly,” “Scream,” and best of all, “Belly of the Beat,” a visual homage to Kate Bush. The remaining three videos are for songs by HANA.

November 2, 2016: Always one to champion the democratization of music production, Grimes contributes an original “sound pack” of samples for Roli Blocks, a portable keyboard that supposedly makes it really easy to create music. Hers is called “Electromagnetic Pulse” and it sounds half-robotic, half-mystical.

November 8, 2016: Grimes recreates an iconic 1964 pro-Lyndon B. Johnson ad in support of Hillary Clinton. In the clip, she pulls petals off a daisy and says, “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”

January 26, 2017: Grimes produces and lends vocals to a new song, “人為機器 (Humans Become Machines),” by Taipei-based rapper Aristophanes, who featured on Art Angels.

January 29, 2017: Following Trump’s travel ban on seven predominantly Muslim countries, Grimes announces that she’ll match donations up to $10,000 for the Council on American-Islam Relations.

February 2, 2017: Grimes and Monáe share their stunning “Venus Fly” video, which features so many elaborately orchestrated bubbles, it required its own “bubbleologist.”

October 20, 2017: Grimes and HANA team up yet again, covering Tegan and Sara’s “Dark Come Soon” under the moniker Trashique.

January 22, 2018: Joining the likes of Post Malone and Danny Brown, Grimes takes to the livestream service Twitch to play the video game “Bloodborne” and answer fan questions. She says she’ll be touring within the year and that her new album has a song dedicated to playing “Dark Souls,” a notoriously difficult RPG.

February 2018: After replying to a fan on Twitter that her new album will be out “realistically [in the] fall,” Grimes hints at tensions with her label, 4AD. “One final album for my shit label and then my first album on a label of my choosing which I’m crazy stoked about eeeee,” she wrote in a now-deleted post. “The second one will be extreme darkness and chaos, the first will be highly collaborative and most glorious light.” Grimes later apologized for writing “negative shit” online.

April 10, 2018: Janelle Monáe debuts her Dirty Computer single “Pynk,” for which Grimes is a producer and vocalist. Unfortunately, Boucher does not appear in the track’s incredible video, which features an abundance of vagina pants.

May 7, 2018: After a swirl of dating rumors, Grimes and Elon Musk attend the Met Gala together; some wonder if the simulation is glitching, others make Fifth Element jokes. Two weeks later, Grimes defends Musk on Twitter against ongoing accusations of union-busting at his company Tesla. Based on this recent photo of Grelon greeting a French bulldog at a pumpkin patch, the odd couple seems to still be going strong.

May 13, 2018: To prove to her fans that her fifth album is “real,” Grimes shares on Instagram a tracklist that is “subject to change.” The Art Angels follow-up could include such on-brand song titles as “Nymphs at Versailles” and “blaze forever like a useless star.”

May 30, 2018: A longtime K-pop fan, Grimes joins the girl group LOONA yyxy for a new song called “love4eva.”

June 2018: The album teasers continue: Grimes shares snippets of two new songs on Twitter. She describes the first as “the cheesy love song I was talking about that I don’t like but everyone else likes” and the second as an “ethereal chav jam that’s like ... a cyberpunk interpretation of the Bajirao Mastani movie.” The following week, she stars in an Apple ad, which previews another new song.

September 20, 2018: Grimes contributes a bubbly theme song for the new Netflix animated series “Hilda,” which follows the adventures of an adorable blue-haired girl.

Late October 2018: Grimes is going off with the collaborations. The first is an electro-pop song called “The Medicine Does Not Control Me” with Mindless Self Indulgence’s Jimmy Urine, followed by a Babymetal-inspired team-up with Poppy, “Play Destroy.”

November 29, 2018: After relaunching her webstore with some new Russian merch, Grimes shares her new single “We Appreciate Power,” which she says “is written from the perspective of a Pro-A.I. Girl Group Propaganda machine” and is “inspired by the North Korean band ‘Moranbong.’”

March 20, 2019: Grimes announces her new album, Miss_Anthrop0cene, which she describes as “a concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change.” “I want to make climate change fun,” she tells the Wall Street Journal. “People don’t care about it, because we’re being guilted. I see the polar bear and want to kill myself. No one wants to look at it, you know? I want to make a reason to look at it. I want to make it beautiful.”

Note: We originally published this piece in November 2018; it was updated on March 20 to reflect the announcement of Miss_Anthrop0cene.