I don't regret it. Is it somewhat shameful to admit? Sure. No person of taste wants to say they walked away from a Godspeed You! Black Emperor performance. It makes you sound like a rube — perhaps confirms that you are, in fact, a rube. But after about 20 minutes of drone, my festival-brain was growing impatient, wondering about the other set taking place across Union Park. It was the summer of 2012, and the Montreal post-rock legends were headlining Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. I suspected that soon this extended bout of tension would give way to the kind of transcendent release on which Godspeed built their reputation. In the moment, though, I felt like I had the gist, and my curiosity was gnawing at me. So I went to see a different artist from Montreal.
Claire Boucher and friends were closing out the Blue Stage, the smaller side venue where a lot of the festival's poppiest and most esoteric artists ended up, which made it perfect for an esoteric pop star like Grimes. (Hilariously, that's where Kendrick fucking Lamar would perform the next afternoon, right in between the Men and Oneohtrix Point Never, with Lady Gaga looking on.) Visions, the album that turned Grimes into an underground sensation, had been out a few months, but I hadn't dived in yet. From a distance, it seemed like ephemeral art-school bullshit, neither as hard-hitting as my favorite indie bands nor as accessible as the post-Kanye rap and R&B stars who were consuming an ever-larger percentage of my listening. But onstage in Chicago, it didn't take long for Grimes to grab my attention.
By this point, indie artists had been cozying up to the sounds of the mainstream for years. It's not like the buzzy guitar bands went away, but the blogs were teeming with projects like How To Dress Well, a philosophy professor's ghostly abstract R&B, and Purity Ring, whose eerie pop music was infused with cutting-edge hip-hop and electronic production. Alt-branded pop stars like Lana Del Rey were on the rise. Even some legacy indie favorites were moving toward their own versions of pop: See Sufjan Stevens and his dancers contorting their way through The Age Of Adz stunner "Too Much" on Fallon.
Grimes' performance felt like a step further down that path, even though her music was weirder and druggier and messier than a lot of her contemporaries. Perched behind her keyboards and devices, rocking long blonde pigtails, Boucher was flanked by her close collaborator BloodPop at his own rig of electronics, plus a pair of scantily clad backup dancers on either side of the stage. Her voice was bright and piercing, sometimes looped and harmonized with itself. The tracks were airy yet dynamic, and they built up slowly, blurring the line between concert and DJ set. There was a charming amateurism to it, as if I were watching a public access version of a big pop production, yet the DIY elements did not obscure the sophistication of her sound. The songs were mesmerizing, full of weird little hooks and beats that hit much harder than I expected. This person was an obvious star, and she had tapped into something vivid and singular.
A lot of people had those kinds of epiphanies in the years between Visions and Art Angels, the grand statement Grimes released 10 years ago today. The gap between albums was nearly four years — plenty of time for hype to reach fever pitch several times over, stoked by a steady trickle of new songs and incendiary pullquotes that made Grimes perhaps the clickiest celebrity in the whole indie music ecosystem. In hindsight, I remember the noise around Art Angels almost as much as the music itself.
It's hard to remember now that the provocation is all that remains, but in the wake of Visions, Boucher was widely hailed by critics as a genius and a hero, especially by Brooklynite bloggers who seemed to have walked out of an episode of Girls. This was an era defined by sites like Buzzfeed, which fawned over Grimes' social media accounts, and Rookie, which dubbed her "our girl/our queen," and Jezebel, which worshipfully posted about the "epic feminist manifesto" she shared on Tumblr at the end of the Visions tour. Her acolytes were drawn to not just her music but her left-of-center style (manifested in her online presence, fashion spreads, and her increasingly elaborate music videos) and her refusal to be disrespected. "i dont want to be infantilized because i refuse to be sexualized," she wrote in that much-heralded Tumblr post. "im tired of being referred to as ‘cute,' as a ‘waif' etc., even when the author, fan, friend, family member etc. is being positive." Yet just as often as she was celebrated, she was raked over the coals.
The blog-world obsession with Grimes was fueled in part by her genuinely fascinating creative output. Arriving after a few years of murky and abstruse releases, Visions — her first release for the venerable indie label 4AD — was off-kilter yet carefully crafted, vaporous yet physical in a way that mirrored her interest in AI and transhumanism, pulling from a wide range of niche and mainstream inspirations at a time when describing your music as "post-internet" still felt novel. She was unapologetically bringing her influences to bear on experimental music: R&B and electro-pop, anime and video games, cyberpunk and vampires. Even more importantly, she was singing fearlessly from a woman's perspective — including, on "Oblivion," about her experience with sexual assault, revolutionary subject matter at a time when the #MeToo movement was still a few years away. Visions was "a Big Bang at the foundations of pop — fuel for the fire that has continued burning down the borders between the mainstream and underground, between genres in general," Jenn Pelly wrote years later at NPR. "The voraciously curious spirit of post-punk was alive in Grimes as a pop language. She took the independence and oddity of bedroom pop and rendered it big screen."
All this was true. But like her spiritual twin Kanye West, Grimes amplified interest in her groundbreaking music with boundless enthusiasm for her big ideas and unfiltered, impassioned takes about a range of issues. She was a polarizing character, unafraid to speak her mind but often putting her foot in her mouth. Some declared her full of shit, a premise that seems increasingly valid as history rolls on. Others praised her as a brilliant innovator, which also seems truer with the passage of time because, dang, her canonical classics still hold up. Whether they found her inspiring or infuriating, the denizens of comment sections everywhere couldn't resist reacting to her every move — so of course music news websites (ours included) aggregated her every Tumblr and Twitter dispatch into content, much to her frustration. "I'm just really bad at editing myself. I speak before I think," she told The Quietus in 2016, before lamenting, "It's tricky. People just take everything you say out of context."
Grimes was the victim and beneficiary of that 2010s media environment. A compulsive poster, she sought to use the internet as an infinite notebook: informally scrawling ideas and updates at a near-constant clip, creating a direct pipeline between her brain and her fans. But as she became more of a public figure, those social media outpourings were thrust into the spotlight to be scrutinized by a far less sympathetic audience. Her inability to communicate informally without her words being harvested for content was a source of intense friction between Grimes and the media; she deleted her Tumblr at point, declaring that it was "not a news source."
At that point the multi-year ramp-up toward Art Angels was only just beginning, as was the blurring between reality and this fantasy realm Boucher had created. "I think the real world was always just this thing I had to deal with, and then Grimes could be a thing which was how I wished it was," she told The Fader in 2015. "Which is weird because [then Grimes became my real world], and now it's becoming this whole other thing." Some of her struggles were universal for women in music, like men who felt the right to dismiss her opinions or invade her personal space to plant an unwanted kiss. Where many men with similar flaws (like, yes, Kanye) were viewed as complicated visionaries, she was rarely afforded the same grace. The next few years would be a bumpy ride.
As the world breathlessly anticipated a new album, Grimes closed out 2013 by announcing she'd signed to Jay Z's management company Roc Nation. By the following summer she'd dropped "Go," a sleek and eerie EDM-adjacent track originally written for fellow Roc Nation artist Rihanna. The song seemed to portend a shift toward a more accessible, mainstream sound, a divisive move among Grimes fans, but she always claimed it was intended as an outlier, a one-off. In the same New York Times feature where she revealed she had scrapped her whole new album and was starting over, she discussed her tendency to get embroiled in online micro-controversies, like the time she faced blowback from ALS patients over her refusal to participate in the ice bucket challenge in protest of the ALS Association's animal testing. She'd gone through media training, she said, to learn "how to stop saying stupid things so I stop having all these constant dramas," but alas, she "didn't really learn anything."
If "Go" was supposed to be a fun curio rather than a bold step forward, "REALiTi" was intended as a quick look back at a road not taken. When Grimes dropped the video in early 2015, the gently strobing pop track — so tender and searching that it was later covered by Natalie Prass — was billed as a demo from the scrapped album, not the lead single from the one she was now prepping for October release. So of course a polished-up version of "REALiTi" ended up on Art Angels after all. There were so many twists and turns like this in the lead-up to the album. The wait was exhilarating and exhausting, and at some points it seemed like this long-promised opus would never come out. And then, all of a sudden, the rollout went into overdrive, and a masterpiece materialized.
Some people will always prefer Visions, but to me, Art Angels is easily Grimes' crowning achievement: the big-budget blockbuster version of her bespoke creative outpouring, big and bright and bold but never by-the-numbers, complex yet direct. It has all the hooks, beats, and thrilling serotonin triggers of pop music at its best, but it's so obviously flowing from the mind of an absolute freak, threaded with Boucher's own unmistakable idiosyncrasies. Whereas Visions came together in a flurry while Grimes was "learning how to make music and just utterly loving every minute of it," Art Angels was the product of more than a year of labor, of meticulously perfecting her craft. All that work paid off.
One of Boucher's recurring talking points was that, because she was a woman, she was often not given her due credit for bringing the music behind that unmistakable voice to life. As she put it in that Fader feature, "The thing that I hate about the music industry is all of a sudden it's like, ‘Grimes is a female musician' and ‘Grimes has a girly voice.' It's like, yeah, but I'm a producer and I spend all day looking at fucking graphs and EQs and doing really technical work." Talking to NPR in 2016, she even compared herself to Calvin Harris, a producer for whom the role of vocalist has never been primary.
Art Angels proved Grimes was more than capable both as a producer and a composer. The album struck an impressive balance. It was filled with "real instruments," guitars in particular, but steeped in the electronics that have always been the bedrock of Grimes' music. The production was slick and professional yet still overflowing with quirks, translating Boucher's endless studio toil into auteurist pop glory — the kind of multilayered album that practically demands high-concept music videos and accompanying visual art for each track. "Kill V. Maim" is written from the perspective of Al Pacino in The Godfather Pt. 2 as a time-traveling, gender-switching vampire, but it's hard not to hear a wink behind the lyric "I'm only a man/ And I do what I can."
On Art Angels, Grimes takes many forms. Intro "Laughing And Being Normal" is practically classical; it's immediately followed by the digital guitar-pop of "California," a sunny diss track aimed at the bloggers who served as her paparazzi: "When you get bored of me, I'll be back on the shelf." Then comes "Scream," a gnarled rap-rock freakout that pairs bars from Taiwanese rapper 潘PAN with searing shrieks. So many tracks evoke the post-Beck late ‘90s moment when genres were colliding in ways both chic and kitschy. The soaring "Artangels" and the pounding Janelle Monae collab "Venus Fly" send me back to the big beat craze, while the walloping hip-hop drums of "World Princess, Pt. II" and the snappy-then-pulsing finale "Butterfly" feel like they could exist in harmony with Len's "Steal My Sunshine." Boucher traipses through a shimmering acoustic wonderland on "Belly Of The Beat" and "Pin," bridging the gap between Lilith Fair and Ray Of Light, while "Easily" imagines a world where Moby produced for Sophie B. Hawkins. It's all so eclectic — so much fun, too, despite the pervasive melancholia throughout.
For all its sophistication and versatility, that's what stands out to me most about Art Angels: It's wall-to-wall bangers, a nonstop endorphin rush that somehow feels homemade no matter how expensively it sparkles. Never is it better than on its exceedingly well-chosen singles, "Flesh Without Blood" and "Kill V. Maim," twin triumphs that still tingle my spine 10 years down the line. The former, a diss track as cybernetic pop-rock masterclass, sweeps me away every time. "If you don't need me, just let me go," Boucher intones sadly amidst the clamor, her heartfelt laments buoyed by industrial-strength beats and guitars. It's one of many songs on Art Angels that translates sadness into euphoria. As for the dancefloor heater "Kill V. Maim," its demonic outbursts, cheerleader chants, and relentless rhythmic onslaught lay waste to me every time. I will never forget the moment my former coworker Gabriela Tully Claymore transitioned from "We Found Love" into "Kill V. Maim" during her DJ set at the Stereogum Christmas concert and dancefloor pandemonium ensued.
Digging deep into this album these past few days has almost been enough to obscure my memory of the past decade, which Grimes spent gradually leaking creative vitality and burning through the goodwill she'd earned with her ascent to alt-pop stardom. Long before her tragic entanglement with Elon Musk and the various controversies that led to her being "exiled from the Left," she was always a warts-and-all proposition, a complicated idol with convoluted ideas. Her last words on the album were a reminder that she wasn't interested in catering to anyone else's expectations: "If you're looking for a dream girl/ I'll never be your dream girl." But after days spent flashing back to the peak of her power and influence, I'm inclined to remember Boucher in her best light, as a transformative artist changing the course of music with an album only she could make. That's how we at Stereogum were thinking about Grimes when, a few weeks after Art Angels dropped, we named it the #1 album of 2015. I don't know if I'd still call it the year's best, but revisiting it now, I'm reminded why anointing Art Angels felt so right. I don't regret that, either.
