The next morning, at a cinderblock-walled recording studio in the Arts District downtown, Boucher wears an Insane Clown Posse T-shirt and leggings covered in cartoon eyeballs. She looks a little more fresh-faced than yesterday, having slept 11 hours instead of the previous night’s three (she says she fell asleep on the couch upon arriving back home, and Brooks carried her to bed). Boucher tracked the majority of the new record at home, but she has spent the past few weeks working out of the vocal booth in a studio Tucker rented to work on new music of his own. Because bass from his beat-heavy productions tends to bleed through the wall, Boucher says she’s been starting her day after he leaves for the night, typically working through the late morning and then listening to her progress in the car. They’re strikingly modest digs for a musician of Grimes’ size, but she seems to have already made them home, lining the room’s bare surfaces with various framed photos of Dolly Parton, miscellaneous stuffed animals, and, because she’s been on a Genghis Khan kick lately, a tacked-up flag of Mongolia.

Around the time she and Tucker wrote “Go,” Boucher says she’d been seriously considering putting life in the public eye on hold to concentrate on writing songs for other musicians. What she didn’t anticipate was that trying to work with other people would only render her conviction in the Grimes project even stronger than before. “It was not just the Rih thing,” she says. “Going into studios, there’s all these engineers there, and they don’t let you touch the equipment,” she says. “I was like, ‘Well, can I just edit my vocals?’ And they’d be like ‘No, just tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.’ And then a male producer would come in, and he’d be allowed to do it. It was so sexist. I was, like, aghast. It made me really disillusioned with the music industry. It made me realize what I was doing is important.”

Listen to just a couple songs from the new album, and you’ll hear flickers of that righteous indignation. It’s there in the staccato rocker “Flesh Without Blood,” which crests into a gloriously skybound climax: If you don’t need me, just let me go. Another song—a “diss track about male producers” that layers helium-filled vocals over dense, tumbling breakbeats—draws inspiration from the final scene of Alexander Pushkin’s lyric poem Eugene Onegin. “It’s about a guy who acts like he knows everything and then comes back crawling on his knees, which has happened to me so many times,” says Boucher. Still another—a ferocious-sounding club track with twanging subs and planned verses from three female MCs whose names she isn’t ready to reveal—will be about “being too scary to be objectified.”

“They’re not all diss tracks, but there’s a lot of diss tracks,” Boucher tells me. “I think all my other albums were, like, sad. And this time it’s more happy and angry. I live in my own house that I pay for. I bought all this equipment myself. I control my own life now. No one has any say over what I do or where I go or when I do it.” This time around—perhaps because she doesn’t want to feel hemmed in by the Grimes persona—she’s says she’s also planning on rolling out some new imaginary alter egos: “Okay, there’s Grimes, but there’s other ones too now—and they’re like a girl group,” she says. “There’s Screechy Bat, who’s the metal one. There’s one that’s super vampish and sexy now—I don’t know her name yet, but she’s like the Ginger Spice.”

Maybe, for all her escapist misadventures, Boucher’s long and rocky relationship with real life has been leading her to this: to proudly owning the reality she’s been living for the past few years, that of a larger-than-life pop star who still does everything—from recording and engineering her own music, to editing and even color-correcting her own videos—like she’s figuring it out from her college bedroom. That’s why, in describing the unique, at times painfully paradoxical position she occupies in the pop world, she’s probably more inclined to align herself with Nine Inch Nails mastermind and inveterate DIY-er Trent Reznor than anybody else: “Trent Reznor started out making music on computers,” she says. “He was smart. He was into math. He was coming at it from an intellectual perspective and a scientific perspective. He made Pretty Hate Machine all by himself. That’s where I came from.” In returning to the alternative rock sounds she gravitated to in high school—not just in Reznor but also in mainstream iconoclasts like Marilyn Manson and Billy Corgan—she says she’s also coming home to the truth of the Grimes project: “Representing the alternative,” she says. “Not having to answer to a big label. Not having to answer to anyone artistically, but also being visible. I think being visible is important to me because I’m trying to represent something politically.” I ask her what she thinks that is. “That women can do technical work,” she says without missing a beat. “That I can be a producer and a pop star and also very experimental.”

Ask her the same question on another day, and she might tell you a different story—but that was the story she told me, and it’s a story that ends with Aristophanes, a Taiwan-based female MC whose music involves rapping slinkily in Mandarin over seasick, glitchy beats. Boucher discovered her a few months ago, on SoundCloud; she’s one of the mysterious collaborators slated to appear on the new Grimes album, and during the last hour of my visit, they’re scheduled to video-chat on Skype.

It’s 6PM in Los Angeles and 9AM in Taiwan, and adding to the surreality of the moment, they’re just e-meeting now for the first time—Boucher at her studio console and Aristophanes inside a sun-flooded apartment she shares with her sister in Taipei. Giggles and awkward silences ensue; the women volley simple questions back and forth in English for some time, two people at opposite ends of the earth trying to find some common ground. Then Boucher asks Aristophanes what it’s like being a girl rapper in Taipei, and the title of their collaborative nu-metal track, “SCREAM,” begins to make sense: “I think being female is sometimes so weird,” Aristophanes explains. “Sometimes at my gigs, the male MCs and producers will say, ‘That’s not rap; that’s not hip-hop.’ Maybe because they’re judging my skill. I can’t feel very comfortable hanging out with them, so I just stay in my home and spend more time on music.”