Grimes

Biography

In December 2010 Claire Boucher left McGill University in Montreal. By then she had been making music for several years, and a little over a year later her name was known far beyond the university city.

She was born on 17 March 1988 in Vancouver, into a family with French, Italian and Ukrainian roots. She attended a Catholic school and studied ballet for eleven years. In 2006, after graduating from Lord Byng Secondary School, she moved to Montreal and enrolled at McGill. She taught herself music and drawing, by her own account. Her stage name dates from Myspace, around 2007. The site let artists list three genres, and she entered “grime” three times without knowing what kind of music it was. Her first album, “Geidi Primes”, a concept album inspired by the Dune novels, came out in January 2010 on Arbutus Records, and the second, “Halfaxa”, in October of the same year. After it she began to perform and tour outside Montreal for the first time. In 2011 she released a split record with the musician d’Eon, “Darkbloom”, and from May she opened for Lykke Li on her North American tour.

In January 2012 Grimes signed with the label 4AD. “Visions” was released on 21 February 2012; by her own account, she recorded most of it in three weeks, alone in her Montreal apartment. The album won a Juno Award (the Canadian music industry prize) for Electronic Album of the Year, and Pitchfork named the song “Oblivion” the best song of 2012. Grimes directed its video together with Emily Kai Bock. In March 2012 she held an exhibition and charity auction of her paintings and drawings at the Audio Visual Arts gallery in New York. In 2013 she received a Webby Award as Artist of the Year.

Her next album, “Art Angels”, came out in November 2015. She produced it herself and used “real instruments”, rather than just the synthesizer and sampler of her earlier records. Several publications named it the best album of the year. She released a series of videos for four of its songs, and in 2017 she won a Juno for the video for “Kill V. Maim”. In 2016 the song “Medieval Warfare” was included in the soundtrack of the film “Suicide Squad”.

Painting was never a sideline. She makes her album covers, concert posters and merchandise herself, drawing on Japanese anime, manga and the comics of Charles Burns and Daniel Clowes. Her drawings have been shown in gallery exhibitions, including at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She made an alternate cover for the comic “The Wicked + The Divine” and in 2013 designed a capsule collection of T-shirts for Saint Laurent. In May 2020 her work was shown online at Gallery Platform Los Angeles and at the Maccarone gallery, where it included a piece called “Selling Out”. She explained that she did not want anyone to buy it.

She described her fifth album, “Miss Anthropocene”, as a concept record about a goddess who changes the climate. It was released on 21 February 2020. The song “4ÆM” was first heard at The Game Awards 2019, where Grimes introduced herself as Lizzy Wizzy, a character in the game “Cyberpunk 2077” whom she voiced. She wrote the theme music for the animated series “Hilda”, recorded a song with Bring Me the Horizon, and in 2021 joined the panel of judges on the television show “Alter Ego”.

Later she worked with Janelle Monáe, Caroline Polachek, IC3PEAK and others. A new album, “Psy Opera”, has been announced, but sources differ on its dates and on whether it has been released.