“What would Christine do?” asks a sharp-suited Héloïse Letissier suddenly, almost upturning a cup of green tea in the process. “It’s a question I find myself asking a lot. What would she do?”
“What would Christine do,” exactly? Considering her track record thus far, just about anything. Last month saw Christine and her accompanying Queens standing in the middle of Dutch festival Best Kept Secret’s main stage, Christine holding biceps tensed, and yelling “I’m a dude!” at the top of her lungs. At a landmark sold-out show at London’s The Roundhouse earlier this year, – with a certain Elton John in attendance, no less – Christine danced so much that she split her trousers. “Things happen in London!” she grinned at the time, hurling flowers across the room, and welcoming every single attendee to an all-enveloping barrage of leaping dance routines, and plunking, subversive pop songs about finding freakish freedom in boundless expression. Christine and The Queens is about smashing free of every mould, and slipping away from definition.
‘When I’m on stage nothing can happen to me, truly,” smiles Héloïse; who surprisingly claims to be very shy when it comes to her everyday, non-Christine existence. “It’s just a rectangle,” she quips, “a different floor. But I think it creates something really weird. The stage is like a ring, it’s like a fight. In a cool way.”
Born at London’s Madame Jojo’s, thanks to the occasionally forceful encouragement of the venue’s resident drag queens, Héloïse ‘s debut album, ‘Chaleur Humaine’, was written to get over a break-up, and back to herself. “They said, sing louder! Do something with your fucking sadness! “ she remembers “With Christine, I stopped trying to choose and make sense, and decided to feel,” Héloïse adds. “When I was creating Christine in the very beginning as a character, I was writing ‘Christine is my anger,’” she adds. That anger, she says, stems particularly from a society obsessed with neat boxes. “It’s something I’ve experienced, and felt, and lived with. Changing your mind, and feeling like a boy, and sometimes wanting to be desired as a woman, or lurk after someone like a macho man – it’s something I’ve lived,” she nods. “Christine was a statement about being an unusual little thing, moving and loving people,” Héloïse smiles, adding, “I’m attracted to characters that are queer. Michael Jackson, Björk, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Boy George. They were creatures. And I guess I want to be a creature as well.”
Though her debut album ‘Chaleur Humaine’ is relatively new to our own shores, it’s been out for two years now in Héloïse’s native France. Coincidentally, the record arrived just as debate was raging in the country around the topic of gay marriage…”and I arrived with my flowers and gender-fluid songs, like ‘hi!’” laughs Héloïse, clearly delighted by the whole scenario. As stuffy conservatives squabbled away, there was Christine, flippantly declaring “I’m a man now,” on her song ‘iT’ and leaping around on stage in a tuxedo.
“I like to shift language within the space of one song,” Héloïse explains. “When you think about queerness, you think about language. Language itself can be a tool, or something to oppress you. If you change the gender of a word, suddenly it’s weird. Or if you say, constantly on stage, ‘I’m a man’ - being a young girl, and a tiny one -” she laughs referencing her own modest height, “it creates something interesting.”
Shifting rapidly between French and English with little regard for grammar or convention, and letting rip punchy, spiky-edged pop songs with a smirking side-helping of subversion, it’s dead exciting stuff, this. And now, the rest of the world is playing catch up.
Originally published in DIY Magazine, Feb 2016. Words El Hunt.
Savages don’t mess about. The first, carefully chosen glimpse of the band’s new record arrived as ‘The Answer’ - the very definition of a confident statement by title alone. Agitated razor blade guitars collide headlong with drums that pound the living shit out of everything in sight, with no relent. Sheer mechanical brawn smacks into the heart headlong, on the teetering edge of obliterating everything. In their second album ‘Adore Life’ Savages also unearth something less towering, that is subject to poor decisions, and vulnerability amid the onslaught of white noise. Savages write music that is completely human. They seem to provide an answer or remedy to the chaotic, tangled-up web of life. There’s nobody else around quite like this.
The band rock up in their customary all-black uniforms, cutting the formidable sort of picture you’d expect. When Jehnny Beth and Gemma Thompson order a cuppa, they make it seem swiftly efficient. Wrong-footings aren’t shot down in flames, but receive a far more cutting reply; the air of being mildly unimpressed. Frighteningly ambitious, and willing to give every ounce of their being to this magical beast that they’ve created together, Savages have more than earned their right to be imposing, and they are imposing. Truly scary, though? Nah.
Today, drummer Fay Milton is busy sparring with her granola bar wrapper. “Morning!” she exclaims chirpily, neglecting to notice that the clock has already chimed midday. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she laughs, “a bunch of words. Let’s talk about food?” she eventually suggests.
“It’s not even that early,” concedes her band mate, bassist Ayşe Hassan.
Fay’s granola-based crisis surely marks out one of very few instances where Savages have been unsure of exactly what to say. Upon forming, the band set out with intense focus; eyes keenly trained on a single objective. ‘Silence Yourself’ was a debut concerned with insular hyper-concentration. Its end goal - amid everyone else outside their bubble trying to pull the new band in different directions - was total artistic freedom.
“If you are focused, you are harder to reach. If you are distracted, you are available,” declared the part-poem-part-manifesto printed on the debut’s cover. With the barriers up, and all outside interferers violently opposed, ‘Silence Yourself’ - by name, and nature - was a bolshy, confrontational first record. Intentionally so. “You have to fight a bit for your own space,” states Jehnny Beth. “I think every band that starts has to do it. It’s your first totem.”
The band certainly fought for space and control over the dialogue, and then some. They were unwilling to be shaped against their wills. As the first rave reviews began to come out, Jehnny Beth calmly took a biro to every press clipping that referred to Savages as an “all-female band” - quietly taking down the empty categorisation, and marking it out as irrelevant. When their debut was nominated for the Mercury Prize, Savages didn’t just zip up and sip the complimentary champers. Though they were grateful for the wider acclaim, they also openly debated what the nomination symbolises, and how it lines up with what they want to achieve as a band. That’s Savages, all over.
“I don’t want to carry any flags, I’m just doing my thing,” Jehnny Beth once told DIY over the phone, speaking from a bustling Italian restaurant shortly after that Mercury nod in 2013. “I will just carry my own armour,” she stated, gleefully, “and do my own shit!”
“I think we were very guarded on the first record,” admits Fay in a similar vein, today. “You have to establish yourself in the way you want.” Ayşe’s on the same page, too, though she insists that much of their debut’s confrontation was less to do with anger, and more concerned with survival. “‘Silence Yourself’ was about us having focus,” she explains. “We needed to protect ourselves as a band from everything; to learn how to be a band together. To keep what we had together, as a band.”
Savages quickly garnered a fearsome reputation; for their volatile live show, their seriousness, their artistic intensity, and their complete intolerance for dealing with other people’s nonsense. It also landed them with a name for being, to put it bluntly, scary.
“I think scary’s ok,” says a decidedly not-scary Jehnny Beth today, leaning across the table with an arched eyebrow and comedy shrug. “I like scary. Why not?”
“I think, as a woman as well, if you’re being serious, you’re scary,” adds Fay. “Ooo!” she exclaims, providing a pantomime villain noise for extra effect. “When you know what you want, you cut to the chase,” grins Ayşe. “You say it.”
“It’s an intensity,” expands guitarist Gemma Thompson. “Sometimes you have to just play. You can’t think of anything at all, past that point. That puts you in an intense place. That’s what you’re after,” she concludes. “That’s what you’re trying to find. It’s the reason that we do this.”
Standing tall and balanced precariously on the metal barriers of live shows, like a ship’s steely-eyed figurehead at the helm of the good ship Savage, it’s no real surprise that Jehnny Beth in particular revels in a confrontational strain of theatricality.
“The stage is a place of freedom,” she grins. “You can be anything.”
With every sweat-drenched club show, and every chaos-fuelled festival appearance that followed the band’s debut, that drama only grew more pronounced; more unlike anything else on earth. Gradually the instant magnetism between Savages and their surging crowd led them in a new direction. Their destination? The zest-for-life-filled, connection-seeking ‘Adore Life’.
“Our shows were getting warmer and warmer, and something was happening,” nods Jehnny. “There’s a really good French word I can’t translate,” she says, ”bienveillant.”
Meaning roughly the same thing as benevolent, it’s an accurate word for what Savages have become. For every move their debut made to build up walls, and assemble bunkers, ‘Adore Life’ tears them back down with vengeance.
“I think that comes from us playing together for three years,” Ayşe assesses. “Naturally we’ve grown together as a band, experienced things from the audience. I see a gig as a shared experience of emotion and intensity between the audience and us. It’s that transfer of energy that we’ve become more comfortable with, maybe, in a strange way. We embrace it more rather than being insular.”
In that muddied, indefinable way that electronic sparks and lightbulb moments tend to take on a concrete shape, ‘Adore Life’ steadily began to find its own form. Live connection was already firmly on the band’s mind. They watched Michael Gira - one of their heroes, and the man who infamously called Savages “terrifying” before later apologising - perform several years ago at Best Kept Secret festival, with his band Swans. Another handful of jigsaw pieces slotted into the hazy puzzle. After that Swans show Jehnny Beth went away and wrote down a phrase on one of her many online blog posts. “Love was the answer.” That sentence began to set down meaningful root, without Savages even realising at the time.
“That was a key moment in finding a way to talk about love,” agrees Jehnny, looking back on that pivotal Swans show in 2013. “How [Gira] does it, obviously, is very universal, and grandiose, goth-like. That was interesting for us.” Her initial jotting-down - “love was the answer” - would, over time, become the hell-raising second album opener, ‘The Answer’. The wheels were careering into unstoppable motion.
“Gemma came up with that riff, and we decided to make that the song,” Jehnny Beth explains. “That impact, and that sound - like being in the middle of the eye of the storm - made it possible to use this line. It allowed us to say something vulnerable, and naive, in a way.”
Once that idea of carefully tensioned contrast hit like a weighty tonne of feathers, there was no looking back. Savages found themselves writing sprawlingly ambitious music, as loud as it was looming.
“I remember the guitar sound and the bass invading all the corridors. Even to the toilets you could hear them,” observes Jehnny, remembering the band’s three-week stint in RAK studios in London. “Out the front, if the door was open, you could hear squalls of guitar,” says Gemma, looking back. “Down the street!” smirks a delighted Jehnny. “The posh street, the posh people. That was good.”
With these pillars in place, Savages set out with another of their infamous manifestos in mind for album number two. “We try to work with intention,” says Jehnny, who has strong feelings about the subject. “Writing manifestos can be perceived as too ‘serious’,” wrote the frontwoman three years ago. “It became rather playful for me,” she said. “This is not school, you don’t have to please anyone but yourself, you don’t have to be a good student. However, you are your own teacher.”
It’s a sentiment she reiterates today. “A manifesto is a positive statement,” she points out. “It’s something that should feel inspiring once you’ve read it.”
The manifesto for ‘Adore Life’ was focused on several distinct ideas. Firstly, they agree unanimously, the process was about trust. “We could leave each other to it,” says Gemma, “and they would understand everything we needed to achieve.” Throughout the process members of Savages were constantly “popping in and out,” of the picture, with full confidence that they were all picturing the same end result. “Freedom was rule number one,” states Jehnny, “create space for each other in what we’re doing.”
“We wanted to do a record about love,” she continues, moving on to objective number two. “It was instinctive, at first,” she says, referring back to those initial flint-sparks, “and then it became a decision. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it all the way. We’re not going to skip some parts of love, that are maybe more dark, or more shameful, more personal.”
No aspect of love escapes unstudied on ‘Adore Life’. Stealing away from anonymous bedrooms, fucking in corridors, balancing an entire friendship on the risky knife-edge of lust, and surrendering to all-consuming desire, much airtime is given to those gnarled corners of love that spell out danger in hastily scrawled warning letters. As much as Richard Curtis would have you believe otherwise, love doesn’t always end with a brawl for honour in a Greek restaurant, a choreographed snog in a scenic location, or a merrily rolling reel of credits. Love is usually far more messy than that.
“We were trying to make a record that was quite psychotic and nuanced,” Jehnny Beth says. “Love, with all different facets, and the contradictory feelings you can have, when in love.”
‘When In Love’, indeed. Just one prominent example of Savages’ newly-unearthed touch of warmth, that song hits an especially specific, everyday nerve. “I hate your taste in music,” spits Jehnny Beth at one point, her voice bursting with sheer, undiluted venom.
She roars with laughter today at the suggestion that conflicting music taste is a Tinder dater’s worst nightmare. “It’s interesting to say very detailed, trivial things like that, that really get under your skin for some reason,” she reasons, “and to contrast that with a more universal idea.”
Fay has her own favourite lyric on that same track. “I’m gonna leave you forever, but next time I’m in the neighbourhood I’ll be knocking at your door,” she beams. “You know, when you’re like ‘I’m leaving you!’ but you’re too mad to let it happen? ‘Please take me back!’ I love that. Melodrama, a bit rock opera.”
“I used to love playing that song, when we were first testing it out,” says Ayşe, “I used to look at Fay, and she’d be…” her bandmate fist-pumps exuberantly across the table. “Brackets: punching the air,” Fay quips for the benefit of the dictaphone. “It’s got some vibes in there.”
Despite their frequent - and tongue in cheek - insistence that they’re a “humourless” band, that same playfulness has always been present in Savages’ repertoire. A sharp-tongued lyricist, Jehnny Beth’s dry, dark bend on wit peeked through the deceiving surface rage of debut tracks like ‘Strife’ - a song which asked ”how come I’ve been doing things with you I would never tell my mum?” Those foundations are magnified on ‘Adore Life’. “We did humour!” announces Fay, wryly. “But you know,” reasons Ayşe, being - ironically - entirely serious at this point. ”People did think we were serious.”
While the stomping ‘T.I.W.Y.G’ - which is, according to Fay “intentionally quite mad.” - concludes with boisterous canned laughter, sort-of title track ‘Adore’ veers from goosebumpy sparseness to arm-swinging rock opera territory in a joy-filled skip. That’s not to say that Savages have donned comedy water-pistols. ‘Adore Life’ is also an aggressive, vulnerable, thoughtful, poetic beast of an album, and it’s very much part of the same journey.
“We couldn’t have done it without that first record being there, and that process of touring.” Gemma says. “It gives us the freedom and openness to say more within the context of Savages. We’re strong enough to do that.”
“Perhaps having deconstructed everything we should be thinking about putting everything back together,” concluded the band in ‘Silence Yourself’’s opening statement of intent. In the beginning, Savages set out like careful dissectors, peeling off every spare bit of musical gristle, and leaving behind a bare, minimal skeleton. Now, there’s a hopeful, utopian edge. An answer to the bleak and deconstructed, ‘Adore Life’ does seem like an album concerned with putting everything back together again, too. Space and time are no longer held hostage; eerie, suspended moments of silence ring through ‘Adore’, and improvised pockets building like tumbling boulders of noise. Jehnny Beth ponders this, frowning. “It could be seen like that, actually,” she decides. “Yeah. It could.”
“They inform each other,” she continues. “I wouldn’t say the second record is the answer, because that would mean that this is it…” she says, followed by an uproarious outburst. “That’s it! Done! That’s the answer!” laughs Gemma. “I understand where you’re coming from,” Jehnny picks up. “It’s a really instinctive process. A rise,” finishes Gemma.
“Rise is a good word, actually,” concludes Jehnny. “An instinctive rise.” “It sounds like intellectual porn,” exclaims Gemma suddenly.
As they attempt to regain composure, One Direction’s ‘Drag Me Down’ blares without warning out of the crackly cafe speakers. The pair wince slightly. “I don’t remember your question,” deadpans Jehnny Beth.
Savages’ gathering together today comes shortly after they played their final show of a packed year, in the school hall-type surroundings of Tufnell Park Dome. The band showcased a huge chunk of ‘Adore Life,’ menacing a transfixed room with the thudding bass of ‘Sad Person’ and the waltzing, meandering strut, ‘Slowing Down the World’. The reaction in that room was of the instantly palpable kind. The air hung thick with a rare variety of tingly, goosebumpy energy that can almost be grabbed a-hold of, because it seems so physical, so real.
“I felt it,” says Jehnny Beth, quietly, before grinning widely. “I can’t even imagine how it’s going to be when people know the record! It’s gonna be awesome.”
Lately, the band have been starting their sets with the sparse, isolated warm-up vocals of ‘I Need Something New’ - a song they originally wrote on the stage as “a way to speak to each other.” A search for newness, and a ferocious pursuit of the unexpected, remains Savages’ biggest manifesto point of all. “It’s funny,” starts Jehnny Beth. “I feel sometimes it calms my nerves if I know that something unexpected is going to happen. In a way it’s accepting the chaos. It’s less scary than thinking, ‘I’ve got to do this same thing, exactly the same as yesterday’. That feels scary,” she laughs.
“Make it yours,” offers Gemma, as a tailored alternative to simply making it new. “Make it new for yourself,” agrees Jehnny. “That’s enough.
The Genius of Grimes: Claire Boucher exists on another planet
Originally published in DIY Magazine, March 2016. Words El Hunt.
“Sorry, I have so many beverages here!” exclaims Claire Boucher suddenly, attempting to juggle a mug full of coffee, and an elegant wine flute. Distracted every so often by a mountain she can glimpse out of her Adelaide window, and in the process of taking ‘Art Angels’ on tour for the first time, Grimes is, as she puts it herself, in a “mildly insane” mood today, having just awoken from a nap. “This is water, not wine,” she qualifies, quickly. “I just like the look of the glass,” she explains, studying it. “I feel like I’m in Sex and the City or something.”
A couple of years ago, the idea that Grimes was a potential subscriber to Carrie Bradshaw and co.’s hapless romantic adventures seemed unlikely. Squirrelled away in darkened basements, making bizarrely twisted - and yes, overwhelmingly zeitgeisty - sounds, Claire Boucher struck as an incredibly serious musician. Though she remains a true perfectionist, obsessed with every microparticle of her craft Grimes is also becoming a rocket-fuelled cultural hoover with no limits. Less pop, and more endlessly fascinated by popular culture itself, anything is game for absorption into her retina-bashing slash movie meets sci-fl flick universe; everything that emerges out the other side is life in the vivid dream, enhanced and larger-than-reality for reasons beyond everyday comprehension. It’s an ability very few artists possess. In each generation, you can count people like Grimes on one hand.
‘Art Angels’ - Grimes’ fourth record, and her first since her breakthrough third, ‘Visions’ - sees her taking on more ferociously varied facets than ever before. From the gender-bending vampire mobster that runs riot spitting football chants over ‘Kill V. Maim,’ to the record’s bizarre, garish, no-fucks-given clashing of all genres going, ‘Art Angels’ is a little like Grimes’ beloved Game of Thrones in scope and ambition; if it were set in a gaudy, futuristic neon wonderland instead of Westeros. Though she still readily admits to battling against stage fright, Grimes’ live show is a saturated glimpse into the world she’s designed, letting rip with fast-unfurling, cathartic screams. Designers these days are tripping over one another to photograph her fearless Adidas sandal and sock combinations, and in the studio, Boucher’s dark days of Adderall-fuelled writing binges have been disowned and left behind. Now, she operates from a studio in her home. Everything is entirely on her own terms.
Originally, Grimes was conceived as a sort of alter-ego; a space-dust flecked girl band controlled by Claire Boucher The Producer, safe and hidden behind the curtains. Grimes itself has grown enormously in scope in the last couple of years, taking on ever more technicoloured variations. Claire Boucher, meanwhile has emerged gradually from her mysterious control box. Though one especially infamous character from the programme that inspired her multiple beverages today, Sex and the City, might not feature as one of Grimes’ voices, per se, she’s a definite influence on how Claire Boucher conducts herself these days, all the same.
“Samantha,” Grimes announces, naming the Sex and the City character she identifies most heavily with, without a moment’s hesitation. “It’s her crass nature,” she qualifies. “I appreciate her lack of giving a fuck. I relate to it. A lot of times I get in trouble are a result of not giving a fuck…” she adds, changing tact, “and then people taking it out of context.”
Several times today, Grimes alludes to this frequent knack for “getting in trouble.” Really, though, she’s talking about her words being sensationalised, and her caution is fair enough. With ‘Visions,’ she set an entire agenda and influenced a whole trail of lesser imitators; her knarled, blooping nightmare-scapes being hawked by every aspiring weirdo out there with some free time and a copy of GarageBand. Part and parcel with that came a great deal of critical recognition, and also constant scrutiny. An artist who started out making weird, crunking noise-pop about obese cats in the warehouses of Mile End, Montreal, suddenly found her flippant, off-hand remarks turning into bold-letter headlines on pop’s biggest gossip websites, and alternative music publications alike.
Most prominently, there was the dramatic non-saga of the ‘scrapped album,’ and Grimes’ ‘panning’ of her one-off song ‘Go’. Originally penned at a songwriting bootcamp, she was toying with behind the scenes writing; worn down by her constant visibility in the public eye. Though the song was ultimately turned down by Rihanna - who is signed to Grimes’ management, Roc Nation - Grimes liked it enough to put it out there anyway. The media machine painted an entirely different picture; the sort of scene that depicted Grimes chickening out of a whole new direction, simply because a portion of her fans weren’t entirely keen. It’s a ludicrously untrue twist on events.
“I’m going to discuss a thing I’m not supposed to discuss because it always gets me in trouble…” Grimes starts, that notorious word rearing its head once again. She shrugs, and continues anyway. “Me and my friend Blood Diamonds were writing ‘Go’ for another artist [Rihanna] and the process of pretending I was someone else at that time, I had so much fun making that song. I realised I had this terrible feeling of constraint, that everyone’s always judging me, you know….” she trails off. “Because they do. They still do.”
Fast-forward from the media ruckus surrounding ‘Art Angels’’ creation, and Grimes silences the lot in a swift fell. Hurling herself into a swimming pool, Grimes returned as macabre, pastel-drenched Marie Antoinette, her bloodied gowns staining the crystal-clear waters.“Got a doll that looks just like you,” chides ‘Flesh Without Blood,’ nodding - but only nonchalantly, in a half-arsed, unbothered way - towards people’s expectations and the inaccurate figure ‘Visions,’ and the churning media cogs, created. Forget everything you thought you knew about Grimes.
“People were like, ‘oh it’s so cute and naive,’” Grimes says of ‘Visions’ today. “I don’t wanna succeed on the basis of cute naivety, or endearing failure or charming lack of knowledge,” she says, firmly, “I want to succeed because I’m good.”
It’s a mission that Grimes takes incredibly seriously; from the making of ‘Art Angels’ itself to the relentless months she spends working on her complex music videos. Blowing almost all of her advance on the most high-tech home studio set up she could muster, she set about poring over complex production techniques, physical string arrangements, and crisp, in-your-face high fidelity. She had a drive to reach new heights. “I kind of went insane during it,” she admits. “It’s mentally difficult when people are like, ‘oh she’s so cute, she screws up, she always hits the wrong button, it’s so lo-fi and you can tell that she doesn’t have good equipment’” she says, before putting on a high-pitched, whinging voice in imitation, “neh neh neh.”
She keeps coming back to the idea of transforming herself into something menacing and downright scary, a monstrously ambitious artist to whom patronising adjectives like “cute” will never stick. It’s no more pronounced than in the monstrously brilliant Janelle Monáe-featuring ‘Venus Fly,‘ from ‘Art Angels’. “What if I cut my teeth? Cut my hair underneath my chin,” she asks, or rather proudly threatens, before demanding “why you looking at me?!” Tinny, timid, super-trebled melodies rev into life, the whole thing growing into clawed, fearsome rebuff of objectification.
“In retrospect I see more pathos in [‘Art Angels’] than when I was actually making it, about that kind of stuff,” reasons Grimes. “I’m in a weird situation..” she starts, “where if I always say and do stupid things, I get a lot of attention, but I actually fucking hate it. It’s really distressing to me. I’m in a constant state of distress because I’m always… there’s always a new thing, you know?”
“People think… she must want attention so much, and it’s like, no,” she continues, start-stopping sentences. “I feel really disassociated when my hair’s a normal colour, shit like that. Shows are still a nightmare for me,” she admits. “You wanna make art, and you wanna make music. The art and music I admire is really character-centric. Beyoncé, Rihanna, Bowie, Prince, whatever… there’s this core character. I kind of need that, but at the same time it’s really uncomfortable to have this much attention. There’s always this inherent tension where you’re like, no, leave me alone,” she says, “but also, I am completely embedded so deep, with my personality, in this work,” she trails off. “It’s weird.”
“Most people ask me,” she observes, putting on a comedy British accent. “’Do you want to be like Katy Perry?’ Sorry,” she laughs. “Anyway.”
There’s no denying that Grimes is one of these rare magical characters that Claire Boucher - still sipping from a seemingly bottomless mug of coffee - personally admires. The aesthetic she paints mashes together pastichey combinations; androgynous Al Pacino-type mobster vampires, Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World comic books, the Russian poet Pushkin, ‘Lord of the Rings’, Enya, the music for ‘The Legend of Zelda’, and Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic ‘Dune’. Out of breath yet? Grimes is dizzyingly vast, and yet it’s unmistakable.
The idea that all of this bold, boundless expression marks Grimes turning into a Pop Star, she says, confuses her no end. Judging by the liberal smattering of swear words she drops into conversation around the subject, it’s also an assertion Claire Boucher clearly finds annoying. Vehemently dedicated to keeping full control over every single aspect of the Grimes project - from hand-drawn album covers, to self-directed videos - and signed to independent label 4AD, she actively distances herself from the smoke and mirrors of cookie-cutter singers performing songs written by a ten-strong team.
“It depends,” concedes Grimes. “If you classify David Bowie and the Ramones as pop, yeah Grimes is pop. But if you’re talking Top 40, I do think it’s pretty different from that. The means to the end are extremely different in particular.”
“When I made ‘Visions’,” she laughs, “I thought it was my sell-out Britney pop moment! I didn’t think it would succeed, either. I remember A/B-ing [comparing sound quality] with a Britney song, and being like, ‘this is just totally as good as this Britney song, I’m so great!’” she remembers, visibly amused.
“This is really embarrassing…” Grimes starts, before, typically, shrugging and continuing her thread anyway, “but I didn’t know who Mariah Carey was until I was like, 24. I went on this cross-country road trip with my dad, and he was like, you have to get into R&B, so he got me into her. There are a lot of hipster Mariah Carey remixes, like Burial and stuff, and I remember listening to it. It was really hip at the time that I first started making music. I was like, ‘why aren’t there any actual bands like this? Why don’t they get actual singers, and make original songs instead of doing these hip remixes?’ That was kind of my thought.”
Grimes is not pop music, in that she does not imitate anything that has come before her. Instead, studying the world - complete with all its ugliness, brashness, and macabre unpleasantries - she’s something unclassifiable on the fringes while setting the entire agenda. “It’s weird to me that people think ‘Art Angels’ is a poppier thing, because in terms of the actual process, I was trying so much harder to make pop music when I made ‘Visions,’” she says. “I was actively trying to make pop music when I made ‘Visions’. With ‘Art Angels,’ I wasn’t.” At approximately this point, Grimes decided to give an almighty “fuck you” to all convention, for good.
“To me, [‘Art Angels’ is] an emo rock record,” Grimes says, changing tact entirely seriously. “I was listening to Queen and Bowie, My Chemical Romance, Le Tigre,“ she lists “and I thought people might think it was my rock record. I was so confused by the response.”
Garish, neon-hued, and screaming with a breathless cramming-in of every feasible influence, ‘Art Angels’ takes everything that Grimes loves - from the hellish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, to J-Pop, and Russian ballet set designs - and throws it at the wax. From the twanging hoedown vibe of ‘California’ - think Dolly Parton on a mad one at Comic Con - to the merrily chirruping intro of ‘Butterfly’ ‘Art Angels’ is, in the best possible way, a little bit uncool.
“That was a goal!” exclaims a delighted Grimes.
“I wanted to stop being seen as a hipster thing, I guess,” she explains, referring to the whole pastel-grunge, synth-pop aesthetic that ‘Visions’ became an integral part of. “I actually don’t mind hipsters,” she clarifies, “hipsters are rad. But I didn’t want [Grimes] to be seen as a thing that existed because it was cool. It’s the same thing as the cute thing - ‘oh, Grimes, because it’s cool’. No, no, it’s not cool, and it’s not cute.”
“I really wanted to make a Baby Bash song,” says Grimes, talking specifically about ‘Art Angels’ closer, ‘Butterfly’. For the uninitiated, Baby Bash is a smooth-crooning 90s rapper - again, not especially renowned for being cool. This goal - naturally - led Grimes into a mess of old Japanese jazz compilations, and it was there that she discovered ‘Penguin Dancer’ by Masayoshi Takanaka. She ended up sampling it for ‘Butterfly’‘s introduction. “It sounds like a kids TV show theme song,” she says excitedly. “I want ‘Butterfly’ to be a really all-ages song, like a kids TV vibe song.”
‘Butterfly’ - vaguely about a curious little minibeast who discovers air travel for the first time - feels like a symbolic launching off from the record where Grimes finds her wings. Having seized back the narrative, trampling all over it with trebled-up riffs, Grimes concludes ‘Art Angels’ by saying one thing - “I’ll never be your dream girl.” It’s the one headline in the entire world she wants written in bold.
So, where on earth does Grimes go from here? Nowhere on earth, to hazard a guess; more likely, she’ll wind up in some other distant musical galaxy, creating daring, experimental, and boundary-pushing art out of the meteor dust whizzing around her super-charged neurons. As Boucher’s beloved Frank Herbert - who wrote Dune - pointed out; “beware of heroes”. Rely on your own judgement instead, make your own mistakes, and question everything. It’s a mantra that Grimes follows to the letter. Blazing her own trail, and flinging open the door to a whole new realm of possibilities, Grimes is a genius alright. What’s more, she’s only just getting started.
