FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Twenty: Grimes
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MY twentieth edition of this feature…
is quite timely. Whilst Grimes has only a few albums under her belt, I think she is an idol of the future. Certainly, she is someone who inspires others; she is an artist who does things like no other. Her album, Miss Anthropocene, is out on Friday (21st), and she has just released a new single: Delete Forever is an intriguing song and something she has not really done before. In terms of sound, it is a mix of Oasis and Country music and, if you know her previous work, it is quite a departure! She said that this was the first song that made her feel like she was a singer. Rather than experimentation and electronics, there is a more natural performance but, even if she has stepped away from her usual blueprint, it is a fantastic song that could only come from her mind! Miss Anthropocene is one of the most anticipated albums of this year, and I know it will be met with huge critical acclaim. Claire Elise Boucher is Grimes; born in 1988 in Canada, she is a multi-talented singer, songwriter, and producer – not to mention a visual artist! One reason why I think she is an idol is that her music mixes all sorts of sounds together. You get all these exotic tones and strange beats; it all melts together naturally, and you are transported into a new world.
Grimes was born and raised in Vancouver, and she began releasing material independently in the late-2000s. Grimes released two albums in 2010 – Geidi Primes and Halifaxa – more on them soon. Those albums were released through Arbutus Records, but she soon signed to 4AD. Just to track back a second…Boucher relocated from Vancouver to Montreal in 2006, where she attended McGill University; she studied for a double major in Neuroscience and Russian Literature – which might explain why her music is so damn smart and remains in the brain long after you have heard it! Although she left in 2011 before she got her degree, I can how her academic studies would have impacted her creativity and what she addressed in her music. Grimes released music on MySpace in 2007 – remember that great site?! – and her name came about because artists had to list their three favourite genres – ‘Grime’ was one of them Boucher chose! By 2010, Geidi Primes was out in the world. It was released on 10th January by Arbutus Records, and it was released in the U.K. the following year. As you’d expect from Grimes, her debut album was not conventional and lacking in depth. It is a concept album based on Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune, and David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation. Despite the fact it would be a little while before Grimes accrued worldwide attention, her debut album did get a lot of positive reviews. This is Pitchfork’s reaction:
“As a vocalist, Grimes knows how to work her range. Though she's become known for her impressive falsetto (which she pushes to rapturous, Donna Summer-like heights on the Darkbloom single "Vanessa") and she can occasionally pull of a spooky low tone that's faintly reminiscent of Karin Dreijer Andersson, she spends much of Geidi Primes in mid-range, tuneful deadpan, which lends wry humor to the lines she coos to a lover on "Zoal, Face Dancer": "Everybody thinks that I'm boring/ Many people think I've got no clue." Just because she's spacey-- yes, nerds, those are Dune references scattered throughout the track listing-- doesn't mean she's without earthly wit. It takes a pretty good sense of humor to write an utterly gorgeous closer and call it "Beast Infection".
Given her restlessly prolific creativity (she followed up Geidi Primes with another solid 2010 release, Halfaxa) and the bounding artistic strides she's displayed with her recent singles, Grimes could very well be poised for a meteoric rise with the release of her next full length. But Geidi Primes shows that even her earliest recordings displayed a distinct point of view and an oddly mesmerizing quality. There’s something refreshingly "post-Internet" about that too-- a dreamy soundscape that invites an escape from the glitchy universe, a brief provocation to let go and just bliss out.
People spotted potential and brilliance back then, and it is over ten years since that album came out! I am not sure when I discovered Grimes, but it was probably around 2016 or 2017 – quite late to the party! After a successful and unique debut, Halifaxa cemented Grimes’ reputation as an artist to watch very closely. Grimes does mix a lot together and she covers a pretty large spread when it comes to genres. She is never reckless and scattershot when putting sounds together. Halifaxa is a superb album where Grimes is always in control and never sound disconnected. It is hard to describe the album; it is one that you need to come back to a few times as it has so much going on. In their excellent review, this is what the BBC wrote:
“But it’s not a difficult set, really, not after revisiting its tracks a few times. Constituents might echo from distant homes, spread across the genre spectrum, but Boucher’s quite the craftsman when it comes to weaving a common thread between the elements. Ultimately, one arrives at a clutch of comparison-worthy acts – Gang Gang Dance being the most obvious, though only when the New Yorkers have turns their beats down and their ambient weirdness up. Also crawling, rather than springing, to mind are Salem, whose robust production is summoned on occasion; and Toro Y Moi, in the occasional shaft of sunlight that breaches the otherwise all-consuming darkness. There’s also a retro feel to some of the more upbeat moments – not exactly Studio 54, but certainly brighter than some other ‘net-charming solo sorts recalling 70s and 80s dancefloors behind their digital haze.
Spend long enough in Boucher’s company and one could conclude that, actually, this isn’t as clever as it thinks it is. Not true, though: that she’s made such an initially impenetrable album come brilliantly to life after a second or third spin is a clear sign of (quite a singular) talent. Halfaxa is literally a grower: come back again, and again, and it spreads a second-skin over the listener, one that feels like it was always there. Highs are hard to isolate given the album’s well-designed overall arc, but nevertheless: Weregild breaks from 16-bit twitchiness to some arrestingly witchy vocals and surrounding atmospherics; Devon is a delightful drift that represents one of the record’s most accessible pieces – part Washed Out, part Enya, incredibly; and Hallways glitches and sloshes like Hudson Mohawke trapped in a haunted dungeon.
Persevere, then, and Halfaxa is quite the beguiling beauty – though it’ll likely have you waking in a cold sweat if enjoyed right before bedtime.
It was 2012 when Grimes started to really get into the consciousness of the worldwide media. Her albums in 2010 are brilliant, but it was 2012’s Visions that took her to a whole new level. It was her first album for the 4AD label, and Visions was recorded entirely on Apple’s GarageBand. Now, artists are recording albums on phones and using technology to replace the studio. It was happening in 2012, but not nearly as much as it is now. I am not saying Grimes inspired artists today to record in a less expensive and more accessible way, but the groundbreaking Visions definitely went a long way to change the way artists record and release their music.
With songs like Genesis and Oblivion, Visions is an album that was always going to garner a lot of praise and focus. Still, Grimes was this very original and experimental artist, but I feel like Visions is actually pretty accessible. One does not need to be steeped in any knowledge of a particular genre to appreciate the brilliance of the album. I am going to spend a bit more time – compared with her other albums – on Art Angels, but I want to introduce a couple of reviews of Visions, showing how critics felt about this remarkable work. AllMusic wrote a detailed and interesting assessment:
"Genesis" begins with what sounds like the ethereal atmospheres of old-school sounds of her label 4AD before coalescing into irresistibly bouncy pop. Boucher performs a similar trick on the brilliant "Oblivion," which sets lyrics inspired by a sexual assault to deceptively radiant synth pop buoyed by an insistent, instantly recognizable bass line. While Visions' songs are still largely free from obvious structures -- "Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)" segues into a minor-key passage like a dream turning dark -- Boucher has learned the values of space and control, as the intricate layers within "Infinite Love Without Fulfillment" and "Visiting Statue" attest. And though "Know the Way" and "Skin" spotlight Grimes' flair for ethereal sensuality, Visions' most kinetic songs are the most distinctive, and allow her to draw on many different influences and sounds.
"Be a Body" boasts a surprisingly funky bass line; on "Circumambient," the song's shadowy R&B leanings are only heightened when Boucher busts out a super-soprano trill that would do Syreeta or Minnie Riperton proud. When she borrows from '80s pop, it never feels slavish, even when she uses frosty Casios on "Vowels = Space and Time" or lets "Colour of Moonlight (Antiochus)" ride on a beat that sounds borrowed from "When Doves Cry." Instead, these retro winks end up bringing out the darkly rhapsodic, kinetic heart of Boucher's music as much as the Asian-tinged melodies, harps, and operatic samples she uses elsewhere. Though little sounded like it when it was released, the impact of Visions' futuristic fantasies was felt, and heard, for years to come”.
Visions is a remarkable album, and one of the best releases of the 2010s. It is all the little details, voices and elements Grimes puts into an album that makes it so remarkable and interesting. I am excited to hear what her new album has to offer but, in 2012, she was riding a critical high. Actually, rather than bring in another review, I want to quote from an interview in The Guardian. They spoke to Grimes and we got to learn a lot more about this extraordinary musical talent:
"From an early age I knew I would be unhappy if I wasn't doing something creative," she says, settling into an old wheelchair that constitutes La Brique's most comfortable seat. "It could have been art, it could have been architecture. I was always really into painting but I didn't feel like I would be able to do anything new, whereas with music there's still so much to be explored."
A former goth kid from Vancouver, Claire originally moved to Montreal to study Russian literature at McGill University, before switching to the neuroscience course. Music never seemed like a viable option until she started hanging out at La Brique's predecessor Lab Synthèse, where she was encouraged to produce her own tracks by her now-manager and engineer Sebastian Cowan. When Lab Synthèse's co-founder David Matthew Peet killed himself in 2008, she decided that she owed it to him to submit to her to true calling.
"I was like: 'Fuck, I could die. We could all die, at any time. Why the hell am I wasting my time? I'm just going to do what I want to do for the rest of my life. I don't need money.'" To the mild horror of her parents, Claire turned her back on the world of brain biology to pursue Grimes full time. "I've completely fucked my life," she admits cheerily. "I don't live anywhere, I don't see my friends. You have to sacrifice a lot of things to do this. But the pay-off is this incredible freedom."
She concedes that this narrative might be difficult to glean from her lyrics, which are generally elusive and impressionistic, shying away from specifics. "I feel Visions could go a lot further emotionally. It worked for me at the time but now it does seem like I was hiding. I definitely want the next record to be a lot more direct."
PHOTO CREDIT: Ben Grieme for FADER
The names of Nine Inch Nails and notoriously uncompromising noise band Swans are mentioned. But then so is Michael Jackson. "I still want to make pop music," she assures. "I want the music to be more assaulting but more comforting at the same time." Claire gazes happily around the vibrant clutter of La Brique. "That's the basis of this whole Montreal scene. Everyone is really into pop music, everyone has a strong image and everyone is into branding. But everyone also does tons of drugs, makes really experimental music, does crazy shit and lives in a hovel with no heating".
The immense follow-up to Visions, Art Angels, took Grimes from an artist with a huge future to a modern-day idol. Released on 6th November, 2015 (digitally; 11th December on all other formats), Art Angels is a stunning work. I think, as time elapses, Grimes is becoming more accessible, but she is still on a different plain – an artist who can connect with many people, but she does not compromise her vision and ambitions. Featuring appearances by Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes and American singer Janelle Monáe, the album’s two singles- Flesh Without Blood, and Kill V. Maim - are phenomenal; they sport incredible videos! In their review of Art Angels, Billboard remarked the following:
“Throughout Art Angels, she equates love with derangement and disappointment: “Your love kept me alive and made me insane,” she sings in “Realiti,” italicizing the lyric by switching from her usual light and airy voice to something more nasal and choked. She punctuates other tracks with images of blood, destruction, death and defeat. Even though top 40 radio has gotten much weirder recently, as the The Weeknd or Major Lazer’s oddball “Lean On” proves, Grimes’ album probably doesn’t have a career-catapulting single, akin to Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House” or the Tubes’ “She’s a Beauty.” Radio likes a vocal to be shockingly clear and loud in the mix, but Boucher prefers to hide and distort her voice, which is her least impressive, most commonplace tool.
Boucher directs her own videos, paints her album covers, exhibits drawings, curates a great Tumblr, and gives hilarious and nuanced interviews. Even discounting for the tendency of Americans to perceive Canadians as intellectually superior (Marshall McLuhan was a Canuck, but so were Bachman-Turner Overdrive), she’s a canny, self-aware performer. Grimes is an art project at risk of going mainstream, and Boucher knows it. She closes Art Angels with “Butterfly.” Boucher starts the beat, then briefly halts it. The lyrics seem to be about deciding to speak up, in addition to environmental damage. After an album that’s so happily angry, it’s soothing to float above nature. Butterfly is also the name of an out-of-the-cocoon album by Mariah Carey, whom Boucher loves, unironically, and the song feels like a coy, coquettish come-on from a pop star putting herself up for sale, especially when she repeats the sibilant line “Sweeter than a sugarcane.” But the last sound on the album is Boucher, softly vowing, “I’ll never be your dream girl.” Everything she is, she also isn’t”.
I remember hearing about Grimes not that long after Art Angels came out – maybe the year after -, and diving into this immersive and hugely intoxicating album. From what we have heard of Miss Anthropocene so far, it looks likely she has crafted another triumphant album. There was universal acclaim for Art Angels and, five years on, and it still sounds so fresh and interesting.
I will bring in one more review, because it is an album that won a lot of love. The Telegraph were keen to show some affection for Grimes’ fourth studio album:
“…Or SCREAM, which pits a whispered-punchy Taiwanese rap against a springy nu-metal groove and ends with military drums. This may make it sound like a difficult record, but the perfect polish of Grimes' s production enables listeners to surf her quick-fire tangents as easily as an aural internet.
As she opens windows of sound and then clicks them closed before boredom has a chance to settle in, you catch snatches of Taylor Swift, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Prodigy, Aphex Twin and many, many more scudding past.
All the while, she is delivering her own big, melodic hooks (Flesh without Blood) and club bangers like feminist Venus Fly (featuring Janelle Monáe) with its haunting, gallic instrumental break. all adds up to a fearless and fascinating record”.
I am going to move on soon, but I want to bring in an interview from 2015, where Grimes she was very open and revealing. Not that she had been insular beforehand, but I think part of her magic comes from a sense of mystery. It is amazing to think how far Grimes came from that debut album in 2010 to Art Angels in 2015.
Her music was always outstanding, but her fourth album is a revelation. This interview from The Guardian is a fascinating read:
“With Grimes, 27-year-old Claire Boucher has never made any secret of the fact that what you see is not what you get. When she released her last album Visions in 2012 – a collection of phantasmal, banging electropop that sounded as if it had been fed through both a rasping old desktop and the prism of a dream – its rapturous reception took the Vancouver native from cult concern to internet darling (Oblivion, the album’s best known song, was last year named Pitchfork’s track of the decade so far). At the time, Boucher spoke of Grimes as a business venture – a sort of Svengali-meets-singer deal in which she played both parts, exploiting her own self for her own ends. It was an idea that highlighted her creative clout, but it was also a coping mechanism, forming a pop-star proxy to deal with the invasiveness of fame.
“There are things I would never say in interviews that are my opinions. I’m way more political than I am publicly – significantly more extreme,” Boucher tells me when I ask how the Grimes persona manifests itself on occasions such as this (that is, being asked questions by a stranger while perched on the bed of a London hotel room). “There’s lots of people I hate,” she says. But Boucher is struggling to keep up anodyne appearances.
PHOTO CREDIT: Chuck Grant for Interview Magazine
As an enterprise, Grimes has always seemed like a scuffle between creative abandon and calculated moves: what happens when a highly inventive mind attempts to construct a consumer product. The Grimes aesthetic – discordantly multi-coloured hair, not-quite-trendy clothes, album art that looks as if it was done on the inside of a ringbinder during double maths – I’d already describe as pretty unselfconscious-seeming. But Boucher insists her visuals are designed to appease the public.
“In my life, I’m a lot more weird than this,” she explains. “Grimes is more palatable for humans. If it was up to me maybe I’d wear a moustache or something,” she continues, as I start seeing her less as a hipster making bleeding-edge pop, more a kindred spirit of Vic Reeves”.
There has been quite a bit of activity since 2015, but Miss Anthropocene is her upcoming fifth album – it is out on 21st February. Make sure you pre-order the album but, before continuing on, I want to source from an excellent interview that Grimes gave last year. In it, she was asked about her relationship with Elon Musk and how she is perceived by others – especially the media:
“Alongside her artistic output, Boucher has consistently proved herself unafraid to speak out on the political issues that are important to her. In 2016, in the face of a Trump presidency, she recreated a 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson advert in support of Hillary Clinton, stating that in the coming election: “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” The following year, after President Trump announced a travel ban on seven predominantly Muslim countries, she tweeted that she would match donations up to $10,000 for the Council on American-Islam Relations. Last year she joined protesters in British Columbia against Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
It was in this context that Boucher and Musk’s relationship was swiftly and mercilessly dissected in the press. Many publications were quick to link (Elon) Musk to Boucher’s decision to remove the phrase “anti-imperialist” from her Twitter bio. In an article headlined The Trouble with Elon Musk and Grimes, the New Yorker painted their pairing as nothing less than the final collapse of indie culture. “What if ideological distinctions still mattered and were not so easily swept away by a levelling torrent of information and capital?” asked staff writer Naomi Fry. “What if anything still meant something?”
It’s a difficult realisation for anyone who finds themselves in the public eye that they’re no longer in control of their own narrative. But it seems like a particularly cruel irony for Boucher after she worked so hard for so long to make sure she had complete artistic control over every aspect of Grimes. She self-produced every song on every Grimes album, drew her own artwork and directed her own videos, creating a distinct aesthetic universe influenced by Japanese manga and gothic dystopias but became something all of her own. She has never relied on anybody else. “For most artists if you’re not cool for 20 minutes then you can’t get in a room with a good producer and your career is fucking over,” she says. “I never want to be in that situation. I want to be in a situation like I am now where my reputation is at an all-time low and I can still make sick-ass fucking music because I don’t rely on anybody.”
Where does she go from here? The answer, to Boucher, is simple. “If I’m stuck being a villain, I want to pursue villainy artistically,” she says. “If there’s nothing left to lose, that’s actually a really fun idea to me. I think it has freed me artistically. The best part of the movie is the Joker. Everyone loves the villain. Everyone fucking loves Thanos. Let’s make some Thanos art.”
All of which goes some way to explain why the next Grimes album will be, in Boucher’s words, “an evil album about how great climate change is.”
I think Grimes has overcome a lot of judgement from certain quarters, but she has responded with grace and honesty. Her music is what matters most and, as we are less than a week away from her new album, I wanted to celebrate an artist who is on course to becoming a legend; someone that people will look back on years from now and mention alongside the greats. Some might find that rash of me, but one needs to only…
LISTEN to her music to find out.