Crack

* 2012
* 2019

When a female icon emerges from the musical mire, the nonsensical tabloid bile that accompanies her growth is often laughable. So with this in mind, let's dispel a prominent myth about Montreal's Claire Boucher, 24, aka Grimes.

She isn't a devil worshipper, as one garish music sheet prominently described her. Neither does she have an obsession with the occult that defines her as an artist and a person - there's a hell of a lot more going on here. And thank fuck, because you don't craft a whole aura around yourself, your music, image, videos, artwork and live show without having a tad more to your personality than the generic metal band, attention- grabbing tactic of satanic worship.

The hype circling Grimes is palpable, and while it's a necessity to tie everything she does back to the wonderful music she's made, most notably on recent record *Visions*, there is plenty. talk about beyond the music. It's literally all a product of her own innate creativity.

Marrying her love of punk and sinister imagery on her illustrated album artwork, cartoon like skulls adorn the front cover of *Visions*. This is sublimely juxtaposed with music that in its immediacy is characterised by Boucher's childlike, high-pitched effected voice. Beyond this is a selection of beautiful electronic lullabies that are warm, at times dark and totally captivating. *Visions* is an album draws feverishly the imagination with looping and effects creating an otherworldly listening experience, yet buried in the dreamlike sounds this is the capturing of a very real and very personal moment.

*Oblivion*, for example, is a stark recollection of a vicious assault, a connection you're unlikely to deduce from its upbeat nature. And herein lies the continuing series of paradoxes which define Grimes' character. Her mournful subject matter is often married to toe-tapping electronica, her breezy demeanor up against an image that borrows from the gothic, and a love of the extreme metal aesthetic alongside a stripped down, bare-your-soul solo live show. In other words, she's a music journalist's dream. Luckily the music brilliantly stands up to these extroverted external characteristics.

Through maintaining total control, a characteristic strangely absent in the make-up of most modern artists, Grimes has forged a path over four albums that has caught the attention of 4AD, a label versed in artistic freedom having released the likes of Zomby, Twin Shadow and Tune-Yards in recent times. In gravitating to big label status, it was 4AD's commitment to changing absolutely nothing about Boucher's music or image which led to her signing, It's a home from home for an artist whose music needs to be exposed to a larger audience but doesn't feel any pressure to get botox or something equally compromising... ahem...

With a move Berlin on the horizon, almost certainly a positive step in facilitating even more creativity, the small scale of Grimes' DIY recordings (her first album was only released on tape and *Visions*, her fourth effort, was recorded on GarageBand) means there is much room for expansion. Similarly, Boucher admits she learned to play live from... well, actually playing live. It's an experience Crack was exposed to when witnessing her support slot for How To Dress Well at Thekla in Bristol six months previous, when she was clearly hampered by nerves. Almost certainly, Grimes circa 2012 is an entirely different animal. Controlling all elements of the live performance left her with a steep learning curve, but subsequent reports suggest she's flourished.

An icon? Not yet. But certainly one of the most rounded, naturally developed and interesting artists in recent times.

**You were born in Vancouver but you've moved to Montreal. What prompted the move?**

I needed to get out of Vancouver. I grew up there, but it's got a weird small town mentality in a lot of ways.

**So what was your musical development between places?**

Vancouver had much more in the way of punk shows, but then that disappeared and the city has got really expensive. There isn't really any music to speak of there any more. Montreal is kind of the same thing, but much more on the electronic side. There were just parties all the time.

**So was there quite a club scene there? In many ways you seem to straddle the rock scene alongside the world of electronic music.**

There are a lot noise producers in Montreal, but I guess the two scenes generally don't like each other. They are kind of separate. I like noise and punk music more for the general aesthetic and approach, however, in terms of the music I am actually making I am influenced more by electronic and dance music.

**In terms of imagery and your own personal image, if someone hadn't listened to your record they might assume you were more into punk music. Is your image a conscious choice and has this transferred itself into the artwork on the new record?**

I really love metal album covers, especially things like Cradle Of Filth and crazy metal t-shirts and images. I wanted to take that and run it through my own influences. Do you know Charles Burns?

**The cartoonist?**

Yes. My images on the album are like Charles Burns meets Cradle Of Filth t-shirts.

**So who actually did the album cover?**

I did.

**Wow, so you are involved in the process at every level. You play, produce, sing - everything.**

I try to. I also make the videos. Also, when we are booking shows I talk a lot with my manager and try and get opening bands in every city we really like. I don't ever want it to be some random opener that sucks, that we don't like at all. At a point you have to give up and let other people do things, but at the moment I want the Grimes experience to be as good as possible. I guess I'm a bit of a control freak in that respect.

**Is it important to you that when people go to a Grimes live show or listen to a Grimes record they see it as an overall experience rather than purely a musical thing.**

If I'm making the music, it seems ludicrous to me that I wouldn't also be making the video. It's the counterpart, so if I were not heavily involved it wouldn't be Grimes. When I make the music I take everything into account. The presentation of it is a huge thing for me as I'm really drawn to artists that have a strong visual aspect to their work. Take someone like MIA. I don't love MIA, but I love how much control she has over her work. Everything about it is super MIA, and that's great.

**You've released four records in a couple of years and your debut came out on tape. There is obviously a strong DIY aesthetic to what you do.**

I just started playing shows in lofts in Montreal that my friends ran. I released that first record and then immediately just did another one. I didn't even think about it. Every couple of months we'd do a big push and play New York or LA and it all just kept rolling. It was like, 'now I have a booking agent, now I have PR, now I'm working with 4AD.' They were all stepping-stones along the way.

**What was it about 4AD that made you choose them?**

I think they were the only label that didn't want me to change the record. Some labels actually said: "Can you make it more normal?!"

**That's so offensive.**

4AD offer real freedom. It's the most artistic freedom you can possibly be allowed. That is my number one priority by far. They've been very sympathetic to what I've done so far on the Arbutus label in Canada. They've been very accepting of my friends and my manager, as I've had the same manager since I was 14. It means I've managed to keep these relationships and still work with a bigger label.

**How important was How To Dress Well in your development as an artist?**

He's the older, more experienced person who tells you the stuff you need to know. I owe him a lot.

**You do everything onstage yourself? Has your live set up expanded as you've expanded as an artist?**

I was put in a situation where I needed to get a lot better really fast. I was in way over my head, but it's been kind of beneficial. Obviously when I started the Lykke Li tour I wasn't remotely prepared to play those shows. I think that made me a professional musician. It was either respond right now or suffer huge humiliation.

**How do you think people will judge the juxtaposition when listening to *Visions*. It's got some beautiful ethereal songs and your brilliant voice, but then this extreme imagery. Is it designed to shock people at all? How do you feel it may be perceived?**

I didn't think it was weird until people started bringing it up. I think all the visual parts are really beautiful. It's the kind of shit all my friends do. It's the scene I'm part of I guess.

**You obviously think quite hard about religion and the occult. What are your religious beliefs in the broadest sense?**

I believe in aliens. I don't believe in God per se. I have some conspiracy theories, but I don't necessarily want to elaborate on them too much.

**As a beat maker, who really inspires you in that world? Richard D. James, Boards Of Canada, then Outkast, especially Big Boi. And who are the most iconic women to you in music?**

Beyonce, Fever Ray. Those are obvious. Enya.

**There is a fair bit of attention on you at the moment? Is it intimidating? Or are you just walking around really excited?**

Both. It's definitely really exciting. Sometimes it's really overwhelming, it depends on how much sleep I've had.

**What are your future creative plans?**

I'm going to be living in Berlin in June. The music scene great for me there. Outside of Montreal most of the people I know socially live in Berlin. It's as forward as you can get really.

**Was there ever a game plan with *Visions*? It's a very all- encompassing, beautiful album.**

To say what I was going for is an hour-long answer. I wanted to make something that was technically pushing myself to the limit. It's an expression of my feeling at the time. It's a very emotional record.

**Do you think there is the potential for you to become a real icon in modern music?**

I don't want to say and jinx anything, but obviously that would be sick! Even if everyone hates it, I still feel good about it!

- - - - - - - - - -

*Grimes is playing Simple Things Festival Bristol On May 6th*

**Words:** Hulio Bourgeois

Crack/2012/Photoshoot

* Online
* Print

### Interview

Five days before her 31st birthday, Claire Boucher is sat on a pink suede banquette in the Terrace Room of the Sunset Tower Hotel facing out towards a glistening swimming pool. Beyond it is the humdrum brilliance of another sun-bleached day in Los Angeles. If she looks like she’s just rolled out of bed it’s because she has. She’s decided to postpone her birthday celebrations until summer, but whether you acknowledge them or not, birthdays have a special way of making you reflect on the year just gone.

Boucher has had a lot to reckon with. She’s been better known as Grimes since she started making music under that name in 2007, but in the past 12 months the power to define her creation seems to her to have slipped from her grasp. “Without me doing anything, just by random association with other people, I’ve watched my career and my reputation get totally fucking smashed,” she says. “I worked my whole fucking life for this and now everyone thinks I’m so stupid. I was just sitting there incredulous watching my life’s work go down the drain.”

It was in May last year, a couple of months after she turned 30, that Boucher and her partner decided to make their relationship public by appearing together at the Met Gala in New York. This decision was complicated by the fact that her partner is Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who, depending on your perspective, is either humanity’s last hope to colonise Mars and save the species or a union-busting, megalomaniacal James Bond villain in waiting. They made a striking pair: him in a white blazer and an inverted notched priest collar, her in a Musk-designed white marbled high-cut corset paired with a metal collar which looked, as online commentators were quick to point out, not entirely unlike the Tesla logo.

Grimes first emerged from the Montreal warehouse scene as a fiercely independent artist, putting out a pair of hypnotic electronic albums in 2010 on DIY label Arbutus Records: *Geidi Primes*, a concept album about Frank Herbert’s fantasy novel *Dune*, and *Halfaxa*. Her mainstream breakthrough came with third record *Visions* in 2012, which was met with such critical acclaim that two years later *Pitchfork* named *Visions* track *Oblivion* as the best song of the decade so far. Genre-bending 2015 follow-up *Art Angels* proved, according to this magazine, that it’s “okay to like what you like, even if you’re a Dolly Parton fan who’s into J-pop and medieval Mongolia.”

Alongside her artistic output, Boucher has consistently proved herself unafraid to speak out on the political issues that are important to her. In 2016, in the face of a Trump presidency, she recreated a 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson advert in support of Hillary Clinton, stating that in the coming election: “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” The following year, after President Trump announced a travel ban on seven predominantly Muslim countries, she tweeted that she would match donations up to $10,000 for the Council on American-Islam Relations. Last year she joined protesters in British Columbia against Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

It was in this context that Boucher and Musk’s relationship was swiftly and mercilessly dissected in the press. Many publications were quick to link Musk to Boucher’s decision to remove the phrase “anti-imperialist” from her Twitter bio. In an article headlined *The Trouble with Elon Musk and Grimes*, the *New Yorker* painted their pairing as nothing less than the final collapse of indie culture. “What if ideological distinctions still mattered and were not so easily swept away by a levelling torrent of information and capital?” asked staff writer Naomi Fry. “What if anything still meant something?”

Boucher, it’s fair to say, does not agree with this characterisation. “Seriously, fuck the *New Yorker*,” she says, growing agitated. She makes unwavering eye contact. “Fuck the *New York Times*. Fuck *Vice*. You guys think you have journalistic integrity? What the fuck? Now I can’t read the *Guardian* because they’ve written things about me which are completely false. We really do live in a post-truth society. I know it sounds right-wing of me, but the majority of things that have been written about me in the past year were not true.”

In this case the truth, according to Boucher, is that she’d removed the phrase on a whim long before even meeting Musk. “I change my Twitter bio every week,” she says. “I took ‘anti-imperialist’ out literally three or four months before I met Elon. I changed it from ‘anti-imperialist’ to ‘baby wolverine’. That means I love colonialism now? Seriously, what the fuck?”

Boucher argues that in truth her politics could never be easily defined. “I didn’t realise everyone thought I was such a by-the-books socialist,” she says. “My politics are literally insane. I’ll probably go down for it in the end.”

She elaborates: “My Instagram bio was: ‘I pledge allegiance to the robot overlords’ for, like, two years. I thought people understood that I ultimately probably believe in an AI dictatorship. I mean, I don’t think humanity is going to survive anyway. We’re fucked. I think AI is the natural evolution. It’s just like we killed the fucking Neanderthals, and now they’re going to kill us. I don’t think democracy really works. These are the kinds of things I think. I actually, for the short term, am a bit of a socialist, but not economically. I’m into free markets. What can I say? I think capitalism can solve some things.”

It’s a difficult realisation for anyone who finds themselves in the public eye that they’re no longer in control of their own narrative. But it seems like a particularly cruel irony for Boucher after she worked so hard for so long to make sure she had complete artistic control over every aspect of Grimes. She self-produced every song on every Grimes album, drew her own artwork and directed her own videos, creating a distinct aesthetic universe influenced by Japanese manga and gothic dystopias but became something all of her own. She has never relied on anybody else. “For most artists if you’re not cool for 20 minutes then you can’t get in a room with a good producer and your career is fucking over,” she says. “I never want to be in that situation. I want to be in a situation like I am now where my reputation is at an all-time low and I can still make sick-ass fucking music because I don’t rely on anybody.”

Where does she go from here? The answer, to Boucher, is simple. “If I’m stuck being a villain, I want to pursue villainy artistically,” she says. “If there’s nothing left to lose, that’s actually a really fun idea to me. I think it has freed me artistically. The best part of the movie is the Joker. Everyone loves the villain. Everyone fucking loves Thanos. Let’s make some Thanos art.”

All of which goes some way to explain why the next Grimes album will be, in Boucher’s words, “an evil album about how great climate change is.”

The record will be called *Miss Anthropocene*, named after a character that Boucher has created for herself to portray. Miss Anthropocene is climate change brought to life as an anthropomorphic supervillain. Her name, which casts her as a beauty queen, is a pun on ‘misanthrope’ and ‘anthropocene’, which is a proposed scientific name for the geological epoch we’re currently living through – the time period during which human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

{I|“Miss Anthropocene has got a Voldemort vibe. She’s naked all the time and she’s made out of ivory and oil. It’s going to be super tight”}}

“The way I figure it is that climate change sucks and no one wants to read about it because the only time you hear about it is when you’re getting guilted,” explains Boucher. “I wanted to make climate change fun. Miss Anthropocene has got a Voldemort kind of vibe. She’s naked all the time and she’s made out of ivory and oil. It’s going to be super tight.”

The album itself is, as yet, unfinished. “I just made a bunch of music this month and I’ll probably drop that as an EP first, honestly,” she admits. “Just so I can clear my mind to then go back and finish the goddamn album.”

Her most recent single, K-pop-meets-nu-metal banger *We Appreciate Power*, will probably be on the record. The song would fit thematically, because it deals with the possibility that an AI dictatorship might be vindictive and she wants “every song to be about a different way the world could end.” The only thing holding her back from confirming it’ll be on the record is that she shares production credits on the track with frequent collaborator Hana and producer and guitarist Chris Greatti. “I’ve never had any other producers on my records,” she says. “But I should probably just let that go.”

Before meeting Boucher I’d been sent three other new tracks which could appear on either the new record or the EP, each wildly different from the last in style and composition. The first is *[[So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth*, a slow-moving, chaotic tune made using the Google NSynth that will appeal to fans of her second record, *Halfaxa*. The second, *Shall I Compare Thee*, sounds like it’s been lifted from an anime soundtrack and is one of the more recent tracks that Boucher says she made in “like two hours” and could end up on the EP. The last, *My Name is Dark*, is an overwhelming nu-metal monster in the lineage of *Kill V. Maim* and *Medieval Warfare*, which also serves to introduce another new character for Boucher to play with. “Dark is going to be my main alter ego,” she says. “It’s visually the best thing I’ve ever come up with. Everyone is very tired of me making metal and screamo and stuff, so that can just be Dark.”

Who is very tired of her making metal and screamo?

“Twitter. Fans. Honestly, my parents. I came out making beautiful, ethereal, chill synth music and I do still really like that, I just don’t like being pigeonholed so I had to react against it for a minute. Now I’m back to it. I honestly think *Shall I Compare Thee* is kind of *Visions*-y.”

She pauses to take a sip of her coffee, and it occurs to me that the more I listen to Boucher the more I realise she is talking to me above a background roar. The deafening cacophony of voices on the internet pulling apart every aspect of her music, her politics and her personal life is always there whether she engages with it or not. She tells me she quit social media for six months, and now uses it only sparingly, “because there’s just no point in knowing. It’s like in high school when I had major problems. People have always hated me.”

Boucher is turning 31 now and she has learned how to take in hate and convert it like fuel into defiant power. “That’s why I’m making this pro-climate change album,” she says. “I’ll just be a villain now, and that’s cool. I’ll find a way to make that useful to society.”

### Interview

After watching her reputation implode, Grimes leaned into destruction. For her latest album, she brings us the end of the world

Five days before her 31st birthday, Claire Boucher is sat on a pink suede banquette in the Terrace Room of the Sunset Tower Hotel facing out towards a glistening swimming pool. Beyond it is the humdrum brilliance of another sun-bleached day in Los Angeles. If she looks like she’s just rolled out of bed it’s because she has. She’s decided to postpone her birthday celebrations until summer, but whether you acknowledge them or not, birthdays have a special way of making you reflect on the year just gone.

Boucher has had a lot to reckon with. She’s been better known as Grimes since she started making music under that name in 2007, but in the past 12 months the power to define her creation seems to her to have slipped from her grasp. “Without me doing anything, just by random association with other people, I’ve watched my career and my reputation get totally fucking smashed,” she says. “I worked my whole fucking life for this and now everyone thinks I’m so stupid. I was just sitting there incredulous watching my life’s work go down the drain.”

It was in May last year, a couple of months after she turned 30, that Boucher and her boyfriend decided to make their relationship public by appearing together at the Met Gala in New York. This decision was complicated by the fact that her boyfriend is Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who, depending on your perspective, is either humanity’s last hope to colonise Mars and save the species or a unionbusting, megalomaniacal James Bond villain in waiting. They made a striking pair: him in a white blazer and an inverted notched priest collar, her in a Musk-designed white marbled high-cut corset paired with a metal collar which looked, as online commentators were quick to point out, not entirely unlike the Tesla logo.

Some Grimes fans weren’t sure what to make of Boucher’s newly-public relationship. She had first emerged from the Montreal warehouse scene as a fiercely independent artist, putting out a pair of hypnotic electronic albums in 2010 on DIY label Arbutus Records: *Geidi Primes*, a concept album about Frank Herbert’s fantasy novel *Dune*, and *Halfaxa*. Her mainstream breakthrough came with third record *Visions* in 2012, which was met with such critical acclaim that two years later *Pitchfork* named *Visions* track *Oblivion* as the best song of the decade so far. Genre-bending 2015 follow-up *Art Angels* proved, according to this magazine, that it’s “okay to like what you like, even if you’re a Dolly Parton fan who’s into J-pop and medieval Mongolia.”

Alongside her artistic output, Boucher has consistently proved herself unafraid to speak out on the political issues that are important to her. In 2016, in the face of a Trump presidency, she recreated a 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson advert in support of Hillary Clinton, stating that in the coming election: “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” The following year, after President Trump announced a travel ban on seven predominantly Muslim countries, she tweeted that she would match donations up to $10,000 for the Council on American-Islam Relations. Last year she joined protesters in British Columbia against Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

It was in this context that Boucher and Musk’s relationship was swiftly and mercilessly dissected in the press. Many publications were quick to link Musk to Boucher’s decision to remove the phrase “anti-imperialist” from her Twitter bio. In an article headlined ‘*The Trouble with Elon Musk and Grimes*’, the *New Yorker* painted their pairing as nothing less than the final collapse of indie culture. “What if ideological distinctions still mattered and were not so easily swept away by a levelling torrent of information and capital?” asked staff writer Naomi Fry. “What if anything still meant something?”

Boucher, it’s fair to say, does not agree with this characterisation. “Seriously, fuck the *New Yorker*,” she says, growing agitated. She stops fiddling with the pale pink scrunchie around her right wrist and makes unwavering eye contact. “Fuck the *New York Times*. Fuck *Vice*. You guys think you have journalistic integrity? What the fuck? Now I can’t read the *Guardian* because they’ve written things about me which are completely false. We really do live in a post-truth society. I know it sounds right-wing of me, but the majority of things that have been written about me in the past year were not true.”

In this case the truth, according to Boucher, is that she’d removed the phrase on a whim long before even meeting Musk. “I change my Twitter bio every week,” she says. “I took ‘anti-imperialist’ out literally three or four months before I met Elon. I changed it from ‘anti-imperialist’ to ‘baby wolverine’. That means I love colonialism now? Seriously, what the fuck?”

With their relationship out in the open, Boucher found herself being asked by fans on social media to defend Musk’s business practices. In May she tweeted that reports Musk had prevented his workers unionising were “fake news”. She later deleted that post, and in July wrote that she had “literally tried to instigate union vote so y’all wud lay off”. A couple of days earlier, she had argued that Musk’s donations to the Republican party were simply “the price of doing business in America” for an aerospace company. She added that Musk “donates way more money, like absurdly more, to environmental causes.” When this became a news story in its own right, she clarified: “there is no world in which i’m ok w republican donations.. was just trying to explain wut happened.”

While some Grimes fans saw these statements as evidence of Musk’s nefarious influence turning Boucher towards greed, avarice and unfettered capitalism, she argues that in truth her politics could never be easily defined. “I didn’t realise everyone thought I was such a by-the-books socialist,” she says. “My politics are literally insane. I’ll probably go down for it in the end.”

When I ask her what she means by “literally insane,” she elaborates: “My Instagram bio was: ‘I pledge allegiance to the robot overlords’ for, like, two years. I thought people understood that I ultimately probably believe in an AI dictatorship. I mean, I don’t think humanity is going to survive anyway. We’re fucked. I think AI is the natural evolution. It’s just like we killed the fucking Neanderthals, and now they’re going to kill us. I don’t think democracy really works. These are the kinds of things I think. I actually, for the short term, am a bit of a socialist, but not economically. I’m into free markets. What can I say? I think capitalism can solve some things.”

As 2018 wore on, things got progressively weirder. On 7 August, Elon Musk tweeted that he was taking Tesla private at a share price of $420. Azealia Banks, who said she was at Musk’s home waiting to collaborate with Boucher at the time, would later claim that Musk was high when he sent the tweet, and that he’d come up with the figure $420 because Boucher had recently taught him the significance of the number 420 in weed culture.

Over the next month, Banks posted a string of text messages supposedly sent by Boucher on her Instagram story. The screenshots portrayed sexually explicit details and accused “the Russians” of wanting to kill Musk. The whole surreal mess is now the subject of a class action lawsuit by Tesla investors so it’s understandable that Boucher doesn’t want to comment directly, but it’s hard not to assume she has the alleged texts in mind when she tells me: “There have been quotes ascribed to me that I did not say. I can’t go into detail, but I didn’t type that. I’ve never seen that. That’s not me. It sucks when you want to do good in the world and you’re forced to do bad in the world because people are putting things in your mouth that are negative and shitty.”

It’s a difficult realisation for anyone who finds themselves in the public eye that they’re no longer in control of their own narrative. But it seems like a particularly cruel irony for Boucher after she worked so hard for so long to make sure she had complete artistic control over every aspect of Grimes. She self-produced every song on every Grimes album, drew her own artwork and directed her own videos, creating a distinct aesthetic universe that may have been influenced by Japanese manga and gothic dystopias but became something all of her own. She has never relied on anybody else. “For most artists if you’re not cool for 20 minutes then you can’t get in a room with a good producer and your career is fucking over,” she says. “I never want to be in that situation. I want to be in a situation like I am now where my reputation is at an all-time low and I can still make sick-ass fucking music because I don’t rely on anybody.”

If her reputation is truly, as she believes, “at an all-time low” then where does she go from here? The answer, to Boucher, is simple. “If I’m stuck being a villain, I want to pursue villainy artistically,” she says. “If there’s nothing left to lose, that’s actually a really fun idea to me. I think it has freed me artistically. The best part of the movie is the Joker. Everyone loves the villain. Everyone fucking loves Thanos. Let’s make some Thanos art.”

All of which goes some way to explain why the next Grimes album will be, in Boucher’s words, “an evil album about how great climate change is.”

The record will be called *Miss Anthropocene*, named after a character that Boucher has created for herself to portray. Miss Anthropocene is climate change brought to life as an anthropomorphic supervillain. Her name, which casts her as a beauty queen, is a pun on ‘misanthrope’ and ‘anthropocene’, which is a proposed scientific name for the geological epoch we’re currently living through – the time period during which human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

“The way I figure it is that climate change sucks and no one wants to read about it because the only time you hear about it is when you’re getting guilted,” explains Boucher. “I wanted to make climate change fun. Miss Anthropocene has got a Voldemort kind of vibe. She’s naked all the time and she’s made out of ivory and oil. It’s going to be super tight.”
The album itself is, as yet, unfinished. It may not even be her next release. “I just made a bunch of music this month and I’ll probably drop that as an EP first, honestly,” she admits. “Just so I can clear my mind to then go back and finish the goddamn album.”

Her most recent single, K-pop-meets nu-metal banger *We Appreciate Power*, will probably be on the record. The song would fit thematically, because it deals with the possibility that an AI dictatorship might be vindictive and she wants “every song to be about a different way the world could end.” The only thing holding her back from confirming it’ll be on the record is that she shares production credits on the track with frequent collaborator Hana and producer and guitarist Chris Greatti. “I’ve never had any other producers on my records,” she says. “But I should probably just let that go.”

Before meeting Boucher I’d been sent three other new tracks which may or may not appear on either the new record or the EP, each wildly different from the last in style and composition. The first is *So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth*, a slow-moving, chaotic tune made using the Google NSynth that will appeal to fans of her second record, *Halfaxa*. The second, *Shall I Compare Thee*, sounds like it’s been lifted from an anime soundtrack and is one of the more recent tracks that Boucher says she made in “like two hours” and could end up on the EP. The last, *My Name Is Dark*, is an overwhelming nu-metal monster in the lineage of *Kill V. Maim* and *Medieval Warfare*, which also serves to introduce another new character for Boucher to play with. “Dark is going to be my main alter ego,” she says. “It’s visually the best thing I’ve ever come up with. Everyone is very tired of me making metal and screamo and stuff, so that can just be Dark.”

Not for the first time, I find myself disagreeing with Boucher’s perceived critics. Where has she got the idea that “everyone” is very tired of her making metal and screamo?

“People are always like, ‘When are you going to make another…’”

Which people?

“On Twitter. Fans. Honestly, my parents. I came out making beautiful, ethereal, chill synth music and I do still really like that, I just don’t like being pigeonholed so I had to react against it for a minute. Now I’m back to it. I honestly think *Shall I Compare Thee* is kind of *Visions*-y.”

She pauses to take a sip of her coffee, and it occurs to me that the more I listen to Boucher the more I realise she is talking to me above a background roar that only she can hear. The deafening cacophony of voices on the internet pulling apart every aspect of her music, her politics and her relationship is always there whether she engages with it or not. She tells me she quit social media for six months, and now uses it only sparingly, “because there’s just no point in knowing. It’s like in high school when I had major problems. People have always hated me.”

She is turning 31 now, a long way from high school, and she has learned how to take in hate and convert it like fuel into defiant power. “That’s why I’m making this pro-climate change album,” she says. “I’ll just be a villain now, and that’s cool. I’ll find a way to make that useful to society.”
### Credits

Photography: Charlotte Rutherford

Photography Assistance: Morgan Kranston, Christopher Joseph

Production: LMC Worldwide

Production Design: Kaycee Tarricone

PD Assistance: Travis Fischer

3D Artistry: Metapoint.xyz

Styling: Jessica Worrell

Makeup: Anthony Nguyen

Hair: Chanel Croker

**[1]** Vivienne Westwood corset: Pechuga Vintage

Green dress: Collina Strada

Brass choker: Josh Wallace Jewellery

**[2]** Dress: Discount Universe

Platforms: JF London

Jewellery: Vintage

**[3]** Corset dress, brass bra: Elena Velez

Tights: Collina Strada

Rhinestoned claw: Wesley Berryman

Headpiece, jewellery: Vintage

**[4]** Butterfly top: Maroske Peech

Dyed shorts: Collina Strada

Boned lingerie: Aleksandra Kolanko

Jewellery: Vintage

1. ↑ https://ibb.co/zQZVVkp
2. ↑ https://ibb.co/RTYCgQf (Photoshoot: Press Photos/2012)
3. ↑ https://crackmagazine.net/article/long-reads/grimes-is-ready-to-play-the-villain/
4. ↑ https://issuu.com/crackmagazine/docs/issuu-99/s/96492