Night falls. In the cool twilight, purple neon lights flash in the sky as an armada of robots march out of the dusk and into your home. The robots are powered by majick and institute a regime of dance, record collection, and veganism that consumes the world. Humanity transcends its terrestrial bounds and leaps toward the stars. Such is Grimes’s vision.

Canadian electronic auteur Grimes (real name Claire Boucher) is a hard person to pigeonhole. She is at once both a truly gifted artist and a music industry joke, a dichotomy brought about by her off-the-stage antics as much as her outre audiovisual style. Boucher began in the early-2010s underground producing dark wave and spacious electropop. Her 2012 release Visions brought critical acclaim and, if not mainstream success, significantly raised her profile. Visions was full of dreamy shadows of sound: layers of synths glide along threatening beats. Grimes’s airy voice floats above it all, weaving in and out of the smoke like a fairy to fashion hooks and vocal lines that add to the atmosphere. Its success was a surprise and genuinely one of the best albums of the year by any measure.

I admit that I became fascinated with Grimes, although I initially had to make space for her in my musical landscape because, frankly, she’s just weird. Her music videos and performance styles draw heavily from anime, science fiction, and punk culture, a sort of amalgam of all the internet had to offer. In her interviews however, Boucher was articulate, funny, and thoughtful, and over time I became completely sold. 

Her next album, Art Angels, was the day to Visions’s night. It was much brighter with vocals front and center. Far from a sell-out, it demonstrated how Grimes was able to twist pop formulas to her liking, and it was a resounding success. Album highlight “California” exemplifies this, sporting an undeniable melody and strong vocal performance. She collaborated with Janelle Monae and began to emphasise the Japanese influence that has always been underlying her stuff.

And then…she started dating Elong Musk. The billionaire technocrat who runs Tesla and SpaceX, Musk has long been in the news as a proponent of space exploration and green technology. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, he is one of the single most driving forces behind America’s continued (private) space program and the transition into a truly 21st century economic mindset. At first his coupling with Grimes seemed random, but their relationship makes sense. Musk is obsessed with the looming issue of Artificial Intelligence, convinced that it has the capability to undo human kind. As a consequence, he thinks that we must master it so it does not master us. He’s long been known to frequent internet message boards such as reddit and 4chan; it’s not hard to see how these two forward thinking millennials could connect.

However, their romance coincided with a sort of public breakdown. Elon gave an interview on the Joe Rogan show while smoking weed,and shortly after tweeted that he was taking his company public, which caused a legal nightmare for investors and his board members. On top of that, celebrity feuds and rumors of odd behavior from the duo quickly overshadowed anything else they did. In short, Grimes became known primarily as Elon’s manic pixie weird girl.

It seems that she’s kind of leaned into the persona. In a somewhat recent interview with Rolling Stone, she detailed her average daily schedule. This includes things like a deprivation tank to “astro-glide to other dimensions,” sword fighting, yoga, primal scream therapy and recording sessions in a red-light saturated sauna of a studio. Who knows if this is legit or if Grimes is putting on airs, but eccentricity became the go-to expectation for her. Her public persona is so off-the-wall that it is hard to take her seriously, which isn’t a good thing for a singer about to drop an album.

So her new record Miss Anthropocene has a lot riding on it. Pre-release buzz stated that it is a concept record about the rise of AI and humanity’s artistic response; clearly her boyfriend’s influence has rubbed off. It opens with the concurrently booming and beautiful “So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth” which shows that she’s gone back to her darker, pre-Art Angels sound. But the album is produced immaculately, merging the best aspects of her prior work into one. The vibe continues with ballad “Delete Forever,” (which includes banjo!) and “Violence,” which would sound great at a gothic nightclub. Throughout, Grimes incorporates more Asian influences and samples.

Truly, Grimes is the best exemplar of the niche genre “witch house,” which is kind of self-explanatory: spooky, melodic vocals over clanging, noisy beats. There are no hints of smirk or memeing on Miss Anthropocene; all click-bait drama was left at the studio door. The concept doesn’t really come through in the lyrics, as they are oftentimes vague or unintelligible, but the idea of a post-human dystopia reverberates through the rhythms, synth washes, and spritely vocals. It is strange and compelling music, music that makes it easy to see her genuinely singing in a suspension chamber or waiting to record until her blood mineral levels are at the optimal state.

So, who is Grimes? Is she a smart and talented songwriter who puts on an act to get publicity? Is she a quirky artist who lost herself to celebrity and futurist mumbo-jumbo? Or maybe it’s a little bit of both, and even she can’t always tell the difference. Either way, if this is our future, I’ll be happy to hit the post-apocalyptic dance floor, katana in hand.