Part of her wanted to run for the hills (and she did at times). If Boucher was going to separate from her Grimes alter ego, then this would have been the time to cut the cord. I had a really hard time engaging in any types of relationship with men, because I was just so terrified of men for a while.” To write “Oblivion”, which appeared on multiple Best Songs of the Decade lists, the woman who now assumes the guise of Climate Change went “into this masculine world that is associated with sexual assault, but presented as something really welcoming and nice. She was creatively working through an attack of the kind that became more common as her fame gradually increased. The album was recorded at a “psychotic pace” using only Apple’s GarageBand app, and Boucher claimed she didn’t sleep or eat for nine days while using amphetamines to meet the deadline. Her major breakthrough came with 2012’s Visions. Her real ambition was to become a Phil Spector and remain in control, in the shadows. She wanted to prove that “women could do technical work”. Grimes would be the pop-star avatar and Boucher the technician and puppeteer behind the scenes. A friend with whom she had planned to collaborate took their own life in 2008 and that gave her the push to make something creative of her life. She ended up on a houseboat on the Mississippi with a few chickens and a lot of potatoes. But there was a lot of drug-taking and, at some point, a “breakdown” of sorts. In 2006, Grimes went to Montreal’s McGill University to read for a double major in neuroscience and Russian language – focusing on the ways the brain processes noise. According to an interview with The Fader in 2015, she only stepped away from witchcraft after casting a spell during which “the rosary crumbled in my hands, and it was really scary”. She was bullied at Catholic school, where she went through “a Wiccan phase” in seventh grade. The goth-geek in Grimes was drawn to the Japanese cartoons whose bug-eyed, hypersexualised influence is apparent in all her ringbinder-doodled artwork. But beneath the surface, there’s steely discipline, technique and warped, calloused, bloody toes.
On the surface of her sound, there’s so much grace and conventionally pretty storytelling. When I think of Grimes, I always remember the 10 years she spent on ballet, reaching a pre-professional stage before shaving her head and realising she didn’t fit in. Which means she’s always asking her audience: “What’s next? What’s possible? Whaddya think?” That makes engaging with it enormous, enabling fun.
Perhaps because she writes, plays and produces her music alone, nobody is there to answer her questions. People are sniffy about the concept of “background music”, but Grimes makes the sort that pushes brains into bold new places. She has a generous energy, which means I’ve got heaps of work done with less effort while playing her music. But her USP lies in her ability to collide the particles of a pick’n’mix of genres and make fresh/familiar flavours. Although other critics have gushed over Grimes’ “experimental” sounds, I’ve never found her as adventurous as an artist like Björk.
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