Canadian musician and singer-songwriter Grimes has revealed the title and shared some previews of her upcoming album in a lengthy post on her Instagram channel; the record is expected to come out in 2019. Four years after her last album Art Angels in 2015, Miss_Anthropocene will be, in Grimes's own words, a "concept album about the anthropomorphic goddess of climate change".

Miss_Anthropocene, from the union of misanthrope and anthropocene

The concept is anticipated by the title which, as Grimes herself explains, is the union of two words: misanthrope, meaning someone who hates and shuns the human species, and anthropocene, a term coined in the 1980s used to denote a new geological era in which humankind and its activities are considered the primary drivers of change to Earth's ecosystems, including climate change.

Read also: Grimes says no to the ice bucket challenge

The name, invented by Grimes, refers to a fully fledged character who will be the protagonist of the entire album and to whom the artist has also given a form: "The anthropomorphic goddess of climate change, a psychedelic demon dwelling in space. Queen of beauty who savours the end of the world, composed of ivory and oil".

"Every song will be a different incarnation of human extinction" and the first single, We appreciate power, released some time ago, features a "Pro-A.I.-propaganda girl group embodying our potential enslavement/destruction at the hands of artificial general intelligence".

In Grimes's imagination, the end of the world will be pleasant and made gratifying by new technologies which will, ultimately, do their job: anaesthetising the human race and rendering it unaware.

The attempt to personify climate change

Grimes's new album thus promises to be a complex record dealing with rather profound themes, even though the artist's ultimate aim, as is her style, is to make them light and more accessible.

As Grimes herself has revealed: "Climate change is a subject I have always engaged with in a painful way (…) my goal is to make it fun". Or, at the very least, we hope that the character Miss Anthropocene can make it more tangible and less abstract.