On one end of an old Chesterfield sofa in an upmarket north London gastropub, Canadian singer and producer Grimes – Claire Boucher to her mum – is mid-flow: “…like, people will say to me, ‘Claire, why don’t you learn another language?’. But why would I want to say the same thing in a different language, and spend all those hours? It’s going to take like 900 hours or more or something to learn how to say something that I already know how to say.” We’ve reached this point in the conversation via a discussion of the reliability of memory, the Internet, sleeping rough, music software, spaghetti sauces, and whether, crucially, Boucher might suffer from a short attention span. As a follow-up, I ask if she might consider music a kind of…
“Oh yeah, of course music is a language,” she concedes, “but I don’t think you have to learn it, it’s just a matter of confidence. I mean, for me it was just like one day I was just, ‘well I’m gonna do it’ – and then I just did it. From the get-go, I was able to make music. And I’m not remarkable in that sense – I really think that anyone could do it if they wanted to.”
She says this with no hint of arrogance or obnoxiousness, but more a genuine disbelief that not everyone is a natural like her. In a way, there’s a charming self-deprecation to the idea that she thinks she’s just like everyone else, but of course she isn’t. After all, this is a personality that has the self-belief and energy, not to mention the lack of self-consciousness, to quit university to promote and distribute two homemade albums that contain literally the first music she ever made, get herself signed to an international record label (4AD, home to the likes of Bon Iver, St Vincent and tUnE-yArDs) and then follow those records with another entirely bedroom-crafted LP, Visions. And while all of her discography thus far carries the traits, good and bad, of a first-thought-is-best-thought writing process, Visions is her most coherent release yet.
Bleak and pulsating and swathed with remarkable vocals that swerve from sing-song playground chant to the whistle register of Minnie Riperton or Mariah Carey, it’s a moody scrapbook of an album where snippets of song ideas nestle comfortably among fully formed compositions. Made at breakneck speed – three weeks from start to finish – and constructed entirely on Apple’s super-user-friendly GarageBand software, it is an unmistakably modern-sounding album: every chord and melody line is digitally filtered and squeezed, as if carved out of raw ones and zeros and low-bitrate mp3s rather than warm acoustic instruments or vinyl.
Its only nod to a time before its own existence is a scattergun array of influences – from the dark electronica of Boards of Canada and schizoid hip-pop of Outkast, to Whitney Houston’s melismatic vocal stylings and even, occasionally, the smoothly melodious end of Fleetwood Mac – ironically itself a hypermodern combination that can only result from ten years of frantic file-sharing. Indeed, Boucher herself has described her music as “post Internet”, referring to the musical eclecticism that has arisen from total instant access to every song ever. “I just always imagine that if Mariah Carey and Aphex Twin came together, that would be the greatest band ever,” she explains, trying to marry the disparate sounds of her own music. “That’s kinda what Grimes is trying to do: bringing IDM and industrial, and all of these sick genres together with, like, pop. Why didn’t Mariah Carey do that?”
Born in 1988, Boucher grew up in Vancouver with four brothers, listening to the industrial rock and metal that was a staple diet for any self-respecting rebellious teen of the noughties – Marilyn Manson, Tool, Nine Inch Nails and the like. “I liked the aggression and I liked the aesthetic of it,” she explains. “There was Marilyn Manson, this icon, just so beautiful, and he was doing the Michael Jackson pop-star thing, where you live your art, except that it was scary as sh*t.” Although her music bears no relation to the heft and grit of that genre, her appearance still does: huge saucer eyes thick with black eyeliner, and hair – not dyed black for the first time in nine years, she proudly announces – long over shaved sides in a classic undercut. She also sports multi-buckled leather platform boots and home-administered tattoos on her hands, including the icons from 90s sci-fi classic The Fifth Element across her knuckles. It’s a strong, bolshy but ultimately outsider look that matches her disposition.
