Grimes is a Canadian singer, songwriter, producer, music video director, and accomplished musician. Grimes uses her talents to produce avant-garde pop music entirely as a solo effort, and in 2012 she released
Visions; which
New York Times called "one of the most impressive albums of the year".
Grimes is back with a new album, titled
Art Angels, out on November 6th.
Spanning 14 tracks, the new album features collaborations with Janelle Monaé and newcomer, Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes. Art Angels was recorded primarily in her home studio in Los Angeles, CA, where she relocated to from Canada in 2014. Like all of Grimes' previous albums, Art Angeles was written and recorded entirely as a solo endeavor. The new album features more live instrumentation than ever before on a Grimes record. She plays piano, guitar, and violin, continuing her evolution as a musician and a producer for her most ambitious album to date.
Tour Dates ∆
Twitter ∆
Instagram ∆
Tumblr ∆
Spotify ∆
Facebook ∆
Web Store ∆
Official Website
Art Angels was released worldwide on November 6th. Links leading to purchase options are below:
Stream on Spotify
Physical copies / LP
LP comes with 14 art prints, one for each song
Current Metacritic score: 88
The 405: 8.5/10
Visions put Grimes on the map as pop's pure misfit but Art Angels secured her tangible place as the genre's most unconventional star. For those that doubted, she's done that thing she does, but better. More defined.
Clash Music: 8/10
Art Angels is boundary pushing, it’s listenable and it’s Boucher’s most ambitious and most consistent work to date.
Pitchfork: 8.5/10 (Best New Music)
Art Angels is a natural progression from Visions; if you strained out some of the processing and murk of the latter, you would find these structures lurking. Boucher's voice is recognizable and familiar, but it's bigger and has more range and depth than on "Oblivion". This album foregrounds her, samples her, piles tracks of her half a dozen high to form melodies and countermelodies.
Exclaim: 10/10
Grimes has given us a complete record that's everything pop should be in 2015: utterly uncompromising, imaginative and, somehow, universally accessible.
The Needle Drop: 7/10
Grimes returns with a diverse, well-produced pop album that's both accessible and odd.
Billboard: 4 1/2 stars
Art Angels is a marvel of meticulous, even obsessive home-studio recording, uncompromised by bandmates or collaborators.
Pretty Much Amazing - A
Yes, this is in the loosest sense a pop album with enough ideas and melodies to fill a handful of lesser records. But no one would ever confuse it for 1989. Instead, Art Angels is the maximalist brainchild of a prodigious talent. It’s hugely entertaining. It’s delightfully bizarre. It’s refreshingly caustic. If anything, we’d be lucky if this, and not the forthcoming behemoth of booming balladry, were a guaranteed worldwide blockbuster.
Consequence of Sound: A-
Grimes’ fourth album, Art Angels, is simultaneously her most accessible and her least personal body of work. You could trace lines into Boucher’s own narratives in the ragged edges of her first three LPs; you could find the details of her hurt and fold them into your own hurt. But Art Angels is pure Grimes — performative, maximalist, joyful, and broad.
Now Magazine: Perfect
Art Angels is a major victory for deep weird.
The A.V. Club: A-
It’s slick and gritty, fun and funny, and horrifying and grotesque all at once. It will also make you shake your ass like nothing else.
New Musical Express (NME): 4/5
By embracing the pop orthodoxy, you might argue that Boucher has sacrificed some of what made her seem so alien when 4AD debut 'Visions' emerged from the ether back in 2012, but rest assured: she's still laughing and not being normal, only this time, it's all the way to the bank.
