Grimes

Grimes

Since 2010 · Canada

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Visions (2012)

Visions layers looped vocals, cheap synthesizers and dense reverb into something that sounds simultaneously homemade and genuinely otherworldly, the product of an intensely isolated recording process. "Oblivion" is the clearest distillation of that method, its deadpan vocal delivery riding a driving, almost martial beat that turns a lyric about vulnerability into something that sounds strangely triumphant. The whole album favors texture and repetition over conventional song structure without ever losing its pop instincts. It remains the release most responsible for establishing Grimes as one of the decade's defining bedroom-electronic voices.

Sleeve notes

Visions · 2012

Grimes, born Claire Boucher, began recording lo-fi electronic music in Montreal in the late 2000s, self-releasing early albums like Geidi Primes and Halfaxa largely alone with cheap software before developing a more layered, dream-pop-inflected sound built around looped vocals and synthesizer textures. She has pushed back on frequent critical comparisons to Björk as reductive, even while acknowledging real admiration for her, preferring to describe her own music on its own terms.

Visions, her third album, arrived in 2012 and became her commercial and critical breakthrough, recorded largely during a self-imposed period of isolation fueled by amphetamines and near-total sleep deprivation. She continued expanding her sound across further albums afterward, moving toward denser, more maximalist production and increasingly high-profile collaborations. Grimes's catalog has tracked an unusually steep arc from underground bedroom-pop experimentation to mainstream visibility within the space of a single decade.