Electro-pop musician Grimes (aka Claire Boucher) admits she didn’t really know what she was doing when she made her last album, 2012’s gauzy Visions. Still, that release—self-produced in GarageBand over about two weeks—was an out-of-the-ether success, setting Boucher on a path to stardom: She signed with Jay Z’s Roc Nation management company, toured with Lana Del Rey, and recorded a track with Bleachers for an episode of Girls. Despite this elevated profile, the 27-year-old remains fiercely DIY, honing her studio skills and dismissing suggestions that she work with outside producers. Her latest release, Art Angels, is bolder, noisier, and more out there than Visions. Take “SCREAM,” which features obscure Taipei rapper Aristophanes spitting Mandarin over digitally processed screams. Or consider that Boucher wrote some songs from the POVs of a “Suicide Squad-y” crew of alter egos with names like Screechy Bat and Pixel Dust. Or, actually, don’t. “They’re part of a mythology that exists in my head,” she says. “I don’t want to turn them into action figures.” Boucher will allow that she identifies with the villains she’s dreamed up: “Everyone’s so goody-two-shoes—they want everything so clean and professional. Fuck that.” Perhaps grime does pay.

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