Grimes: When a Hero Falls

By Stephen O'Brien

I first discovered Grimes in 2016; I was 14 years old and an avid Tumblr user, religiously following musicians like Lana Del Rey and The Neighbourhood who dominated that scene. Grimes had released her 4th album, Art Angels a few months prior in November 2015, and what drew me to her originally was her connection to Lana, since she opened for Del Rey’s Endless Summer Tour that year. While exploring her discography, I discovered that her song ‘Oblivion’ had been used in an Eircom ad only a few years prior. That ad had captured my 10-year-old mind, not just for the sliding, holographic set, but for the dreamy and mysterious music that soundtracked it. Finding out that the same alien girl was the mind behind that elusive track, I knew I had to delve into her world.

As the average teenager in the mid-2010s, I followed (and made) many fan accounts. I won a competition through one Instagram account, awarding me a download link for Art Angels; this was before I had a consistent Spotify Premium account (not just the sporadic free trial and gift card) and used iTunes far more regularly. I had that album on repeat, and once I got Spotify Premium the rest of Grimes’ discography was there for me to fall into. Back then her Spotify profile was distinct and alluring: she was pale and gangly-looking, arms outstretched in front of a giant wall of roses. Her stance was unnatural, like a creature outside the realms of ‘human’ Her music reflected that. Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, her lo-fi outputs from 2010, were a blend of unintelligible chanting and surrealist synths. It was futuristic and otherworldly, but strangely familiar, like an alien recreating prehistoric music. Her breakthrough album, Visions, was still lo-fi, but much more refined. ‘Circumambient’ is a great example of that refinement; a pop song scattered about in a cacophonous whirlwind of New Order-esque synths and echoey vocals. Visions has many stand-outs like ‘Nightmusic’, ‘Symphonia IX’, and ‘Skin’, though its two most well-known tracks are the already mentioned ‘Oblivion’, and the track ‘Genesis’. Those two tracks have become generationally well-known through TikTok, and do a great job of capturing her raw talent, and why I became infatuated with the Canadian musician in the first place.

Art Angels was a step in a different direction, but it wasn’t a downgrade, far from it in fact. Where her previous output was lo-fi and ethereal, Art Angels was a highly produced dive into pop music, but distinctly Grimes. Like the PC Music label (run by A.G. Cook) that had been gaining attention around this time, Art Angels is over-the-top, bombastic, and colourful. The songs still include her dreamy vocals, but now it feels like music created by a cartoon pop star from the year 3000. Grimes is a producer first and a singer second; Art Angels is an auditory exhibition of her production abilities, showcasing her knack for mixing the pop formula with her eccentric soundscape. Listen to a track like ‘Kill V. Maim’ or ‘Pin’ and it’s evident. I feel indebted to Grimes for soundtracking my life during a time in my life when I was lost and in need of light. ‘World Princess Part II’ and the elusive ‘Realti’ were anchors for me in a sea of dismay and hopelessness, and they meant the world.

I could spend hours parading my love of those 4 albums (and her 2011 collab EP with d’Eon, Darkbloom), but I need to move on and get to the crux of this, to when Grimes started to slip, and that was May 7th 2018: the MET Gala. I didn’t know at the time that seeing Grimes standing next to the infamous billionaire Elon Musk would signal her decline. It was a month before the Tham Luang cave incident when Vernon Unsworth rescued a group of children stuck in a cave, and when Elon, upon losing the chance to stroke his ego and flaunt his wealth, labelled Unsworth a pedophile.This was the first time Musk’s ego issues and desire for public validation became clear to the general public. I only knew of him as the SpaceX guy who Reddit guys heralded as a genius. Back in 2018, I actually thought it was funny that Grimes was dating him; that week on Twitter where Azealia Banks was live-tweeting her experience of being stuck in Musk’s house because of Grimes was hilarious! But that brief appearance on the red carpet became a marker in the timeline of Grimes’ career, and unfortunately, it only goes downhill.

Miss Anthropocene is not a bad album. Songs like ‘Delete Forever’, ‘4ÆM’, and ‘Violence’ are great additions to her discography, and most of the songs are enjoyable, but compared to the albums that preceded, Miss Anthropocene is lackluster. A handful of the tracks like ‘Darkseid’, ‘New Gods’, and ‘Before The Fever’ feel like unfinished, stretched-out interludes, which is especially disappointing as the standard album is only 10 tracks long. The album’s theme, a concept about a god-like figure representing climate change, is incoherent and badly executed. 

At its worst, Miss Anthropocene is like if Art Angels was a teenager going through their angsty, ‘misunderstood’ phase; desperate to be profound, but too focused on coming across as edgy and cool. I still enjoy a lot of Miss Anthropocene, especially the aforementioned ‘Delete Forever’, an electro-country pop song that captures the feelings of lethargic misery when confronted with your past and mistakes. This song conveys the climate change theme she intended with the album incredibly. But the album, despite being worked on for at least two years, felt underwhelming and half-baked.

In the years since Miss Anthropocene, Grimes has promised multiple albums, Book 1 and Book 2, though neither has come to fruition–bar some dreadful songs like the Elon breakup song ‘Player of Games’. When she isn’t peddling AI, NFTs and crypto, she’s making statements like how she ‘kinda likes the patriarchy’, or that she’s ‘happily proud of white culture’ after concerned fans criticized her proximity to far-right figures. She’s been featured on a handful of songs, but they’re all bland American-rave EDM that’s ridiculed online by its fanbase of (self-appointed) ‘enlightened’ people, who co-opt Eastern mysticism in a pathetic, psychedelic-obsessed fashion; it’s the type that takes shrooms once and suddenly proclaims to be an ‘empath’, yet is still deeply fixated on themselves… but that’s beside the point. Her music, which was once self-made and experimental, has now become a pastiche of itself. When before I would have been excited to hear about Grimes and whatever endeavour she was undertaking, I now roll my eyes and mourn the artist that I once adored and admired.

There is a part of me that feels bad writing all this. It’s become apparent as time has passed that Elon was allegedly cruel and controlling towards Grimes, who is in the midst of a legal custody battle with the billionaire over their three children. My inclination to empathize has me considering that this pathetic right-wing pandering she’s doing is due to the manipulation, and I sometimes hold out hope that she could escape this pit she’s fallen into. Back in 2014, when Grimes released the single ‘Go’ (a song originally intended for Rihanna), she received backlash from pretentious music snobs saying that she had sold out. This experience fuelled the direction of Art Angels, as the album had been in a bit of development hell between 2013-2014. I’m reminded of ‘Flesh Without Blood’, a gorgeous track that highlights this treatment, whilst remaining undeniably pop. Whenever I listen to this track, I’m reminded of all of my conflicting emotions surrounding Grimes nowadays. Maybe this entire piece is a repeat of what those fans did back in 2014, but I know in my heart that this is different. I’m not jaded by the decline in her music, I am disappointed that a person I once saw as inspirational and magical has now become a shell of herself. She traded in feminism for the misogynistic crypto bros, she dropped self-made music for AI and outsourcing her work (which led to a Coachella performance labelled as one of the worst of all time). I’ve become disillusioned. I consistently listen to her previous albums, but these songs now hold a different message for me. They capture the feeling that comes from witnessing someone lose their spark. ‘Delete Forever’ has a mournful quality that makes it perfect to act as an elegy for the person Grimes once was. I listen to songs from Geidi Primes or Halfaxa and I hear the bountiful talent she seems to have lost… 

I’m reminded of the lyrics of ‘Flesh Without Blood’ when I bemoan what has happened to Grimes: I don’t see the light I saw in her before, and when it comes to Grimes, I just don’t care anymore.