Music for a World That’s Already Dying

The Faé are children living at the end of the world, Grimes says, with the calm certainty of someone who has accepted a diagnosis. They know humanity won’t be here much longer, and they make art that reflects that knowledge. Which sounds either deeply nihilistic or weirdly freeing, depending on your mood when you read it.

Grimes—the Canadian artist behind Genesis, Oblivion, and Flesh Without Blood—has spent the better part of a decade mutating from lo-fi bedroom eccentric into something harder to categorize. She arrived as an indie curiosity and became something more pointed: an artist for whom apocalypse and pure pop euphoria are not contradictions. Art Angels was the record that convinced me she was operating on a different frequency from almost anyone else making music at that moment.

Now she’s named that frequency. Faé is what she’s calling the new genre—a loose congregation of artists who aren’t flinching from the end times. The playlist she put together to mark its birth pulls in names like Kirara, SZA, and Abra alongside less obvious choices. Whether "genre" is the right word for it almost doesn’t matter. It functions more as a mood board or a manifesto: here is music that knows something is wrong and finds beauty in that knowledge anyway.

There’s a particular kind of exhilaration in end-of-world art when it’s done right. Not the grimdark wallowing in catastrophe, but the version that dances at the edge of the cliff. Grimes has been doing that for years without having a name for it. Trump, Kim Jong-un, and a planet warming faster than anyone wants to admit have apparently given her one.