Grimes
Claire Boucher's Montreal synth-pop project, whose GarageBand-made Visions (2012) holds "Oblivion", Pitchfork's number one track of that year.
Montreal
Claire Elise Boucher was born on March 17, 1988 in Vancouver and moved to Montreal in 2006 to attend McGill University. She listed "grime" as the genre on her MySpace page in 2007 without knowing what grime was; she told Complex in 2012 that she chose Grimes because that page had the most hits among her fake band pages. Her instruments are voice, keyboards, synthesizers, guitar and violin, and she prefers to produce her studio albums herself.
The first records came on Arbutus Records in Montreal: Geidi Primes (January 10, 2010, 31:32, eleven tracks named for Frank Herbert's Dune, Pitchfork 7.5) and Halfaxa (autumn 2010, 55:07, inspired by her time in Halifax, Pitchfork 7.8). She signed to 4AD in January 2012. Art Angels (November 6, 2015), produced and engineered by Boucher alone in her Los Angeles home studio with Ableton Live, reached 36 on the Billboard 200 and scored 88 on Metacritic; Miss Anthropocene followed on February 21, 2020, reaching 32 in the US and 10 in the UK. She signed to Columbia Records in March 2021.
Visions
Visions was released on February 21, 2012 on 4AD (Arbutus in Canada), 48:04 over thirteen tracks, produced by Grimes. It was recorded in about three weeks in August 2011 at her home in Montreal on Apple GarageBand with mainly a Roland Juno-G keyboard, vocal pedals and a sampler, and most songs were finished in a day. Sebastian Cowan mixed and mastered it at La Brique Studio Space. She told Clash: embarrassingly, I recorded the entire album on Garageband. It reached 98 in the US and 67 in the UK, scored 80 on Metacritic, and Pitchfork gave it 8.5 as Best New Music. It won the Juno for electronic album of the year in 2013 and was shortlisted for the 2012 Polaris Prize.
Awards also include a Webby artist of the year in 2013 and a Juno for video of the year for "Kill V. Maim" in 2017.
Albums
Songs
- Oblivion Visions · 2012
The third track of Visions, written and produced by Grimes, with a video shot in two Montreal stadiums.
Sources
- Grimes (musician), Wikipedia
- Visions (Grimes album), Wikipedia
- Who Is Grimes?, Complex (2012-04-01)
- Visions: Grimes, Clash (2012-03-13)