Featured Essay: On Grimes and Art Angels

by Andrew McNally

You can change a lot in ten years. The mid-10s was the most chaotic time in my life, positive and negative (mostly negative). I was living with an ex-girlfriend who was having a prolonged, violent schizophrenic episode, while working at Dunkin’ at 4am and taking grad school classes at night. I was also entering a much healthier romantic relationship with someone 100 miles away. And all of this was happening less than a year after I moved out on my own. I was barely holding it together mentally and financially, with little room for solace. But that solace, like always, showed itself in the form of music. It was around this time that I first heard the lead single off of Art Angels, Grimes’ follow-up to her breakthrough opus Visions. “Flesh Without Blood” is a richly layered song, mixed perfectly so as to be structured like a rock song but as deeply engrossing as a dream-pop one. The number of days I came home from slinging coffee and put that song on with headphones under the bedcovers, even though it was noon, are countless. The song has always invited me in, warmed and welcomed me, and let me rest within the layers of synths and vocals. The lyrics are personal, yet so vague that they do not specify between friend or lover. One of my favorite lines of any song reads, “Remember when we used to say / I love you almost every day” – the double-meaning is so incredibly simple, yet I’d never heard anyone grasp it.

November of that year saw the release of the full album, one that followed up on the territory hinted at in “Flesh.” The record was a departure from previous Grimes albums, ones that cemented her otherwise pop sensibilities in an opaque, witch house background – which led her to stardom anyways. Art Angels largely and divisively staked a claim as an indie-pop album, one in which Grimes (nee Claire Boucher) seemed to be more actively gunning for exposure. The first real song on the album, “California,” is the closest thing to a pop song Grimes has ever made. The album divided fans, but not critics – it was beloved on impact. It was a melting pot of indie influences, from the synthy banger “Kill V. Maim” to the innocent piano of “Easily,” the jazzy guitar sampled on “Butterfly,” and the, well, screaming that permeates “SCREAM.” The album was a message that Grimes had shed her witch house cocoon and was aiming to be a new force to be reckoned with.

Ten years later, and the album remains a top five favorite of mine. “Flesh Without Blood” remains a top three favorite song, no less inviting and shielding than it was in 2015. Truthfully, the whole album remains a comfort listen, one that I can still sink into with headphones on, to temporarily remove the existence of the world around me. But in 2015, I really thought Grimes was the shit. She was a well-educated musician with a natural ability to blend genres. When I learned she booted a bunch of male studio guys who kept trying to take control of her record and instead produced and mixed it herself? I thought that was damn cool. Now, in 2025, it’s utterly impossible to mount a defense of Grimes as a person.

There’s a million articles on canceled musicians, and everyone’s got their takes on how to approach a, say, Marilyn Manson. But what do you do when someone you used to idolize now just kind of really sucks? They say never meet your idols, a problem that social media has exacerbated. Without something like Twitter, we wouldn’t know that Grimes mostly spends her days having incomprehensible thoughts about technology or political takes so paradoxical that you can’t discern what she actually believes, if she can herself. We watched her enter a relationship with Elon Musk just as the tides seemed to start to turn against him. Without social media, she may not have had an indiscriminate number of Musk spawns with names that will subject them to inevitable bullying. We’ve watched the downfall as she attached herself to a man who would later throw an ongoingly-successful coup of the American government and we watch the abjectly depressing fallout of her losing the ability to actually care for her children, kids made by Elon only for good PR. We can debate if Grimes is cancellable or problematic or what not, but we can put it bluntly: she just kind of sucks now. She’s the millennial Courtney Love – someone who has said and done awful things, and also has been abused by a male-dominated societal structure. You can empathize with the way she’s been treated – and I do – while recognizing how sheerly exhausting she is.

The most famous song to come off of Art Angels is the bombastic, outwardly feminist “Kill V. Maim,” an energetic song that’s close to today’s hyperpop. But many of the other songs have a less oversized, less confident feel to them. There’s cheerful innocence and acknowledged naivety across the record, both sonically and lyrically. It was this purity that grabbed me in 2015; as a young adult branching out on my own, I needed a lot of comfort and reminders that my own acknowledged naivety towards the outside world wasn’t a fault. A lot has happened since then, a lot that has burned my brain, soured my morals and torched my bright-eyed opportunism. Ferguson, COVID, Trump, Gaza, Parkland, not to mention student loans, health issues, friend deaths, and the dull grind of my unrealized ambitions getting swallowed by a bureaucratic normality. The same can be said for Grimes; a decade of fascist alignment and awful tattoos have eroded her into a cheap husk of the suave performer she once was. Time is hard on us all, but it can be the worst on your idols.

So now we’re here, at ten years of Art Angels, an impeccable achievement of the form that Grimes just never really capitalized on. She’s only released one album in the interim, one that I personally feel is underrated but still doesn’t hold a candle to her previous work. Her personal life is anything but, a decade of public debasements and bewildering statements. Some of it is self-inflicted, some of it is not; the best thing to come out of Grimes’ orbit in ten years is Azealia Banks saying that she smells like a roll of nickels. I’ve spoken with multiple friends who have never heard her music and say they never will, because, she just sucks. And I can’t blame them – Grimes has burned an enormous amount of goodwill in ten years. The image of her I locked into my brain in 2015 is fully desecrated. And yet, Art Angels still sounds as fresh and original as it did when it was first released. I will forever defend the album (and all of her music, frankly), but it always comes with a disclaimer now. It isn’t hard for me to write off artists who are outed as racists or abusers or whatever evils the music business engenders, but I can’t shake Grimes. Her image as a quirky feminist upstart has been completely inverted, and now she’s just another irritating public figure that we all have to know about for some reason. But damn, is “World Princess part II” still a great song. Art Angels feels like it came from a different dimension, a universe of what could’ve been, where Claire Boucher is lauded as a musical genius and not a weirdo discarded by a Boer who also used to do cool tunes. But we’ll always have the album. And as the country gets increasingly scary and hopeless by the hour, at the hands of Grimes’ fascist ex-lover, I’ll find myself once again retreating back under the covers, comforted by the echoey “uncontrollable” that floats over the guitar line of “Flesh Without Blood.” I may have grown up, matured, and become both pessimistic and stable, but the innocence of the album is still a comfort I can retreat into.  There is an eroding but thorny part of me that hopes she has some comfort, too.

Andrew McNally is a freelance music journalist and fiction writer out of Massachusetts. He is a contributing writer and editor of the award-winning blog Allston Pudding, and his own blog Post-Grad Music Reviews. He can often be found at local Boston punk gigs, walking his dog, or ranking hundreds of albums for no discernible reason. he can be found on blue sky at amcnal.bsky.social, and at amcnal on instagram.

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