The bad news keeps getting worse, and it comes faster than anyone can assimilate: ice storms in Texas, thawing glaciers, vanishing species, ever-more-dangerous wildfires. Today, we watch the weather for portents, for signs of our own fate. The weather has never seemed more pressing, more Biblical; it has never held such threats or foretold such signs. Weather has made its way into all things—into literature, into politics, into every corner and fabric of our existence.
Of course, it has soaked its way into our music too. For years now, as the severity of the climate crisis has revealed itself, and as the degree of environmental degradation has become clearer, musicians have begun rooting around in the existential despair, fear, anger, and grief that is arising like a collective nausea. It has felt like a startled awakening from a long and disorienting slumber. Environmentalism, as a thematic concern, has been nearly vacant from the mainstream stage for the last two generations, since Neil Young implored us to “look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s,” since Joni Mitchell’s paved paradise and Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).”
Popular music’s ensuing turn from environmentalism coincided with an unprecedented rise in carbon emissions—in the last four decades, humans have depleted nearly 60 percent of the available carbon budget for all time. Apart from the occasional big, flashy protest anthem, it almost felt as if culture itself was averting its eyes. But in recent years, as the climate crisis spirals towards its breaking point, artists everywhere are returning to the Earth to ask what can still be learned, and what might still be saved.
In 2015, 197 countries signed the legally binding UN resolution known as the Paris Agreement, in which they agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep planetary warming under 2 degrees Celsius, a pivotal benchmark. 2013 had been the seventh-warmest year in human history; 2014 was the warmest, until it was replaced by 2015, and then by 2016. That year, the year of the election of Donald Trump, ANOHNI released an album called HOPELESSNESS featuring the song “4 Degrees,” an ironic, bitter incantation that cheered on the devastation of the skies and boiling of the fish in the seas. Clarion horns blared as ANOHNI howled, “I wanna see the animals die in the trees.” At the time, it felt like a hex being laid at our feet. In retrospect, it feels like the opening salvo in a climate-aware music revolution.
Ever since then, as the warnings have grown more severe, new music has poured into the breach. The unease twanging in our central nervous system hums in every single genre; anywhere you can find an artist trying to respond to the moment rather than escape from it, you can find someone working through deep dread, anger, or grief at the fate of our planet. Songwriters imagine worlds for the children in which carbon continues to snuff out life. Electronic musicians compose elegies for lost species. Pop musicians use it to sound notes of fashionable doom, or to stir up some easy indignation. The sounds have grown more gothic and severe as climate change has started to look a lot less like soft, everyday environmental degradation and more like certain death, barreling down.
Poring over more than 20 hours of music about climate change, all of it made in the last five years, I kept wondering: What, exactly, is music’s role in our lives as society navigates the coming climate crisis? It sounds like a big question, but it’s fittingly large for a cause that encompasses the entire planet, that encompasses ecology, race, society—everything and anything we care about and wish to preserve. To ask yourself what music does in the time of large-scale ecological death is to ask, in a broader sense, what humans do. Music is the sound of human activity on Earth, after all, the hum our feelings make as we live.
Spend enough time with climate-inspired music, and you sense a larger philosophical struggle playing itself out, with artists taking as many divergent directions as there are coping mechanisms for bad feelings. Fancy a black joke? Maybe you should listen to Matmos’ 2019 album Plastic Anniversary, in which every sound is sourced from plastic materials. In the mood for a glamorous bit of end-of-days nihilism about it all? This is what Billie Eilish provides with her invocation of burning hills in California on “all the good girls go to hell,” and what Lana Del Rey offers, to an extent, when she sings, “The culture is lit/And if this is it/I had a ball” on 2019’s “The greatest.”
The artists doing that considering, and their vantage point, has a heavy bearing on their approach. On 2018’s “Our Street Is a Black River,” Laurie Anderson joined the Kronos Quartet to remember, in her cool, bemused tone—forever the sound of the woman next to you in the elevator who speaks to you out of nowhere—what it felt like to watch as the “sparkling black river crossed the park, and then the highway, and then came silently up our street” from her vantage point in downtown NYC when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. Anderson observed the chaos with childlike wonder: “From above, Sandy was a huge swirl that looked like galaxies whose names I didn’t know,” she murmured, the danger and portent lost in the flash of the light.
Singer-songwriter Natalie Mering, who records as Weyes Blood, explored the idea of hope amid apocalypse on 2019’s Titanic Rising. Over dreamy evocations of Laurel Canyon folk, she sang of “a million people burnin’” in a placid register. The album closes with a brief instrumental track titled “Nearer to Thee,” a reference to the hymn that the string quartet purportedly played from the deck of the Titanic as it sank. For the cover, she built a replica of her childhood bedroom, submerged it in a pool, then dove in and swam around. The final image is oddly serene: Mering gazes at us questioningly, her hair drifting upward while everything else—the bed sheets, the pillows, the teddy bear and trophies—stays put, affixed in place by set designers in scuba gear. The image was half publicity stunt and half private reckoning, as if Mering were conducting a controlled experiment: How would it feel to watch life as we knew it slip beneath the waves?
On the Weather Station’s elegiac new album Ignorance, the changing weather and all of its implications are swirled together with one woman’s internal monologue, mixed in with her own regrets and anxieties. This is a humanistic picture of how climate change lives inside most of us—something we are frozen by for a moment, gazing up at, say, a tree in a city park, “standing as a symbol of what we have blown apart”—before returning to brooding about difficulties communicating, or to the sudden desolation of watching a bird sing out over an empty parking lot.
On her 2020 album Miss Anthropocene, Grimes attempted to embody the goddess of climate change. In interviews, she infamously said she wanted to make climate change “fun,” posting poetic odes to Mother Earth’s destructive power on Instagram in the same spirit that a metal band might have shouted “hail Satan!” at the height of the Satanic-panic ’80s. As a Grimes album—mixing pop-star poses with underground sounds and locating interesting friction between fragility and menace—it’s intriguing. But it approaches the threat of planetary death, of all the animals on land starving and all the creatures in the sea dying, with a sort of wide-eyed remove. On Miss Anthropocene, climate change sounds like just another interesting modern phenomenon, no more or less compelling a subject than Y2K 20 years earlier. The end of days feels figurative, a curiosity.
It’s a salutary reminder that climate change is above all a race and class issue: Elon Musk, the father of Grimes’ child and her partner for years, is the world’s richest man, currently investing in a space shuttle to Mars. For her, and for them, there will always be the fantasy of another option, a vision of planet Earth fading in the rearview window.
The inequality baked into climate change is staggering in its cruelty. The most outsized polluters will suffer least, while island nations contributing almost nothing to the planet’s carbon footprint will drown. This provides another angle of attack for people trying to get a handle on the problem: On his tart 2020 power-pop album Zeros, the inevitability of climate change was a cudgel that Declan McKenna fashioned against the 1-percent billionaires who consider themselves immune: “You think your money’s gonna stop you getting wet/So Noah, you best start building.”
The Afro Yaqui Music Collective’s 2019 record Mirror Butterfly borrowed from Zapatista myths to frame climate change as a systemic injustice: The riotous work folds in the collaborations of a librettist, a composer, a choreographer, and a vocalist named Gizelxanath Rodriguez, who spits invective about forced migration and the ravages of environmental colonialism. The Dominican icon Rita Indiana’s 2020 album Mandinga Times, her first in a decade, featured a dried-out fish skeleton in a fallow sea bed on its cover. The elemental pop lyrics, sung in Spanish, survey burning trash, tsunamis, mountains and plains aflame; she called it a “songbook for the apocalypse.” Listening to more than 30 albums about this topic can give you a birds-eye view of an entire community of artists trying in their perceived isolation to triangulate it.
Metal and punk, of course, were built for end times and societal collapse, and it’s no surprise they have a head start on music about environmental disaster. As the ’70s soured into the ’80s, punks quickly took over environmental degradation when the hippies abandoned it—Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex cheerfully watched the world turning day-glo, climbing over “mounds and mounds of polystyrene foam”; Joe Strummer and Mick Jones gazed at the rising Thames in horror on “London Calling”; the Dead Kennedys sneered about toxic waste dumps and acid rain, and Fugazi shouted about the burning from the sky.
Metal, likewise, has built up a long and proud history of environmentalism, from California thrashers Testament’s 1989 track “Greenhouse Effect” to Polluted Inheritance’s Ecocide in 1992 to the French metal band Gojira, whose somber 2005 concept album From Mars to Sirius included songs called “Ocean Planet” and “Global Warming.” These are the songs and albums that, wholly justifiably, stare the crisis in its face, the scale of it, and simply scream, as long as loud as they can.
Contemporary San Diego death metal band Cattle Decapitation chooses to focus on its vegetarianism, from its name onward, borrowing the genre’s fondness for the gruesome to shock public appetites, Upton Sinclair-style. On “Manufactured Extinct,” the first song on their 2015 album, the bluntly titled The Anthropocene Extinction, band leader Travis Ryan gurgled: “Altered climate accelerating, exacerbated by our human activities/We used it up, we wore it out/We made it do what we could have done without/Machines to make machines, fabricating the end of all living things.” Of course, this being death metal, those lines are not even remotely intelligible without the assistance of a lyric sheet. This is how it is with all hardcore and extreme music, generally—the music is a canvas for the lead vocalist to purge their own private nightmares, while the audience and the fans are free to project whatever their own might be.
A clutch of electronic artists and composers have turned to the sound the Earth itself is making, as if trying to catch the planet in the act of moaning. This is the naturalist’s approach, and you can hear it play out across a wide range of compositions. As Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne has noted, experimental musicians from across the globe have found ways to reckon with environmental destruction: Joseph Raglani’s 2018 album Extinctions features buzzing sounds from our globally collapsing insect population, while AGF’s Commissioned Work, from 2019, samples the cries of endangered lemurs. As fracking and deforestation threaten the Amazon, field musicians are weaving frog calls and rainfall into bucolic electronic music some call eléctrica selvática, or “rainforest electro. “There’s a sense of urgency to connect with organic sounds and recognize that we are part of this natural world,” said the Argentinian composer Pedro Canale, who records as Chancha via Circuito.
Matthew Burtner’s 2019 work Glacier Music began with running water—normally a soothing sound, here charged with foreboding. The Alaskan-born composer’s electroacoustic work mixes strings and woodwinds with the unearthly hum that glaciers make right before cracking. Scientists have only recently learned to read these sounds—in 2018, a paper published by the American Geophysical Union demonstrated that, as reporter Avi Selk wrote in The Washington Post, “a wounded ice shelf will sing about its troubles long before it shows them to us.” Variations in the frequencies of these seismic tones can warn us when meltwater is spreading beneath a glacier’s surface, rendering collapse imminent. Burtner incorporated these sounds into his music, mingling them with high, glossy harmonics in the violins. His aim was to make people care more about glaciers through aural association, connecting listeners more directly to their fate.
Other artists have employed this sort of subliminal activism, hoping to communicate urgency in terms other than graphs with alarming curves or dire headlines. In his 2019 work Climate, the San Francisco-based electroacoustic composer Erik Ian Walker mapped climate data variables onto his compositional framework—rising atmospheric carbon dioxide correlated to tempo; ocean pH to “form,” near-surface air temperature to pitch and harmony; incoming and outgoing longwave radiation to distortion, modulation, and what Walker called “chaos.” “If all of the variables are relatively normal, the music will sound relatively normal,” Walker has explained. “But as the variables change, it may sound like the musicians are playing out of key, playing different pieces, or sounding like it’s going through… a meat-grinder.”
Walker chose the years 1800-2300 as his focus, with each minute of music coinciding to another 25 years of human history. The music itself starts simple, elegiac, a few singing lines from strings against low murmurs from the synthesizers. This is the age before industrialized farming, before steam trains. A simple drumbeat starts about 13 minutes in (around the year 1914, the tail end of the Second Industrial Revolution and the explosion of machine-based manufacturing) along with a gentle chug of guitar.
In a grim sort of irony, the piece only gets engaging when the timeline enters the ’90s and early 2000s, as the musicians start to throw in more off beats and wrong notes, and the pitch and tempo start to careen. As we enter the year 2042, the temperature having increased by 2.6 degrees Celsius, well above the threshold needed to avert catastrophic, irreversible change, the music pitches decisively into chaos, the meter derailing while the violin and synthesizers wheeze and scream, merging into one anguished voice.
Walker’s piece offers a couple of different poignant metaphors—one, the uncontrollable speed with which change will begin occurring if we do not drastically change our ways, and two, the ways in which human endeavor often falls short in the face of this incomprehensible challenge. Extra-musical intentions never stay put in music—its internal landscape is just too slippery and changeable, and whatever specific command you might wish to embed in it will disappear like a penny into a wishing well.
Other experimental artists and electronic producers don’t point so clearly to the cause of their unease; it’s just there, like the weather. The 2020 album Horizogon, by São Paulo-based producer Claudio Szynkier’s Babe, Terror project, is quietly apocalyptic. There are no rolling tanks or engulfing storms, just a slow ooze of difficult-to-pin-down disquiet. It moves in slow-rolling waves, each one bearing upsetting bits of flotsam in its wake—Szynkier has described the music as a “calm and utopian apocalypse,” and that is precisely how it feels. It’s an apt mood for a crisis that is unfolding in ways spectacularly visible (ice storms, hurricanes) and invisible (melting ice caps on the other side of the globe, insects that don’t buzz). His work mulches together natural and human sounds until neither seems of this world, precisely, but some altered future where the emotions are recognizable even as the landscape isn’t.
The tougher question, as always, is what all of this music might help us do, if indeed music can help us do anything concrete at all. The link between music and action is as elusive as the one between actions and consequences, or between feeling and doing. Although every activist movement needs some sort of inciting anthem, some sort of glue to help bring common purpose, such pieces of music usually emerge naturally, chosen by people. Music designed for collective action rarely works that way.
Music designed for memorial or grief, however, almost always does. Like music, grief asks nothing of us other than to feel it. The music that taps into these stiller waters tends to plumb deeper, more mysterious emotions that might, in fact, lead us to act out of our own private sense of volition.
The composer John Luther Adams is a naturalist and environmentalist who has made his life’s calling to document the sense of planetary loss we are living through, both through his music and his writing. Adams spent four decades in Alaska, working as a conservationist and an activist, before shifting into music full-time in the ’80s. He holed up for years in a cabin with nothing more than an old piano deep in the Alaskan wilderness. His heaving 2013 piece, Become Ocean, was perhaps the most soothing statement imaginable about the threat of rising sea levels, precisely because it was so impersonal. The blooming piano pushed underneath the low-lying coronas of horns and strings, sounding like a force with no interest in or awareness of our mortal struggles, or our inability to change the course of our actions.
Kimberly Nicholas, in her new book Under the Sky We Make, notes the power of a protest sign she spotted at a 2016 climate rally: “ICE HAS NO AGENDA; IT JUST MELTS.” This is how Adam’s work feels. Become Ocean, along with his Become River and Become Desert, are simultaneously arid and glassy, rich and full, overwhelming and calming. They are like nature, in other words—not as backdrop to our solitude, or as a victim to our depredations. This is nature as implacable force, and listening to these pieces, it is sometimes disturbingly easy to imagine an Earth centuries in the future, one in which human activity has more or less completely ceased. Perhaps, as the Earth underwent the lengthy, millennia-long process of restoring its equilibrium, it would sound something like this.
The science is certain, even if our long-term future is not: We are poised on the brink of immeasurable loss. Staring at the ceiling of our planet’s capability to sustain us, led by a wavering and uncertain government, we stand only to lose. Certainly, how much we lose remains in our hands, and recent reports suggest that immediate action has the potential to stabilize the climate, but it’s likely that we have insured our suffering, to a certain extent. Loss—immeasurable, irreconcilable loss—faces all of us.
Perhaps this is why, when I’m pondering the cataclysmic difficulties that lie ahead, I keep turning to older music, music that has been around longer and had the opportunity to accrue more human life around it. The lessons we are going to learn in climate change are old lessons, ones that most people alive now have not had the chance to learn firsthand, so the music that rose up to speak most clearly and vividly to me was from older generations.
Over the summer, I found myself crying, unaccountably, while listening to Albert Ayler’s 1965 album Spiritual Unity. I am not the first person to make the connection between the astounding sound that comes from Ayler’s horn and a sort of primordial energy: the poet and critic Amiri Baraka called it “like the singing from a black hole.” But the staggeringly present wail that emerged from Ayler, from the saxophone glued to his lips, is so human that it bowls you over. It is the sound of pain, of joy, as experienced by muscles, a nervous system. It is human, and the more human sound we surround ourselves with, the richer and fuller we shall feel as the world around us dwindles.
I had similarly religious experience recently listening to French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, which was composed, and first performed, from within the walls of a Nazi prison camp. Messiaen found himself drafted into WWII in 1939 as Germany flexed its military might across Europe. After being captured the following year, he was transported to Stalag VIII-A, an encampment with brutal conditions where temperatures often plunged below freezing.
Remarkably, Messiaen encountered not only several other renowned musicians within the camp (cellist Étienne Pasquier, clarinettist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean Le Boulaire) but also a sympathetic, music-loving German guard named Karl-Albert Brüll who furnished Messiaen with writing materials and sequestered him in an empty barracks so he could compose in solitude.
The work Messiaen produced, Quatuor pour la fin du temps, referenced the Book of Revelations in its inscription and took the apocalypse as its starting point. The spare, sere sounds that emerged were at once desolate and awestruck, mourning and affirming—true to the work’s name, the winding melodic lines seemed to hang, suspended, outside of normal space and time. Close your eyes and it’s possible to imagine all four instruments stumbling out, alone, bewildered, onto a stage of utter black. It sounds bereft, haunted, but above all it sounds yearning—the human spirit itself calling out for recognition into the resounding silence.
The initial performance, with Messiaen himself on piano, took place on January 15, 1941, in an unheated barrack, the German soldiers huddled next to their prisoners. The premiere has taken on the quality of myth: Years later, the cellist, Pasquier, would call it a “miracle,” saying: “Everyone listened reverently, with an almost religious respect, including those who perhaps were hearing chamber music for the first time…. They sat perfectly still, in awe.”
It’s a parable, if you want it to be, about the civilizing power of music—the image of the German guards alongside their prisoners in the cold, enraptured, is neat enough for a Hollywood retelling. But what gives the piece its unearthly power, 80 years later, is its harrowingly private sorrow. Messiaen was a devout Christian, but he was an unusually sensual and humanist one for his time. His quartet is a prayer for humanity, trembling with the full knowledge of all the ravages humanity has produced. It was the ultimate act of faith, an expression of profound belief in the face of utter blackness.
Human life, and the decisions we make as a society over the coming years, will largely revolve around the stories we tell each other, the way we frame and envision each other’s lives. It is going to reside in our capacity for empathy, our ability to understand that others exist with needs as pressing as ours, and that the world is not one of convenience. In short, the world we must make will depend largely on the kind of values that have always existed in music.
So many natural occurrences of the next 10 years will seem so inconceivable. The loss of entire habitats, the silencing of birds and insects, the disappearance of marine life on untold scales. In each moment, we will only have each other to turn to. We will all be grieving, and in many respects, it is simple to imagine the sort of ceremony that might emerge. Faced with the death of the Great Barrier Reef, say, or the passing of the last monarch butterfly, we might stand around, feeling helpless and dazed. We might gather near each other, to reflect and to mourn. And then, inevitably, someone will open their mouth to sing.
Listen to a playlist featuring climate-related songs mentioned in this article on Spotify or Apple Music.
