Grimes - Art Angels

Grimes’ long-awaited new album is finally here. Claire Boucher delivers once more. Just looking at the album art, a terrifying illustration of an entrancing three-eyed girl crying tears of blood, this album will deliver just as much of a curve-ball as Visions did. The collaborations confirm this, with tracks that feature the RnB darling Janelle Monae and another one with Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes. Typically, it’s confusing, it’s eclectic, and it’s 100% Grimes.

Art Angel marks a definite shift in direction for the Canadian singer. Featuring everything from dramatically orchestral pieces (laughing without being normal sounds as if it’s been taken directly from a movie soundtrack) to the Graceland-inspired opening for Butterfly. One particularly surprising change is the sunshine and sugar-infused California; it’s how Grimes would sound if Simon Cowell produced her and she had her own brand of below-average perfume. It’s not the paradox that we expect with Grimes: predictably original. It’s electro pop, pure and unashamed.  It would be an alright song had anybody else done it, but for Grimes, it leaves you a little flat.

The whole album is far catchier than Visions; there are discernible verses and choruses, and you’re unwittingly drawn in so that before you know it, you’re on a tennis court in a Victorian wedding dress re-enacting the Flesh Without Blood video. Art Angel has an undeniable energy to it that bounds along from track to track like an excited puppy that bounds off in the park and drags you along on the lead. Realiti is a particularly stand-out track, with typically beautiful, dark, twisted and fantastical lyrics like ‘when we were young, we used to live so close to it/And we were scared that you were beautiful/And when I peered over the edge and seen death, if we are always the same’. 

Seeming non-sequitors suddenly assume an utterly new meaning when put in the context of this brilliantly ascending track, climbing higher and higher. In spite of its name, it almost transcends reality.

It’s different, but brilliant. It’s pop-y, but perfect. It’s great, so it’s definitely Grimes.