Grimes Canadian Singer Born 1988 in Vancouver

Early life

Grimes, whose birth name is Claire Elise Boucher, was born on 17 March 1988 in Vancouver, British Columbia. She grew up in the city and attended Catholic schools there. In 2006 she graduated from Lord Byng Secondary School and moved to Montreal to enter McGill University. She has said she was in its electro-acoustics programme. She has described herself as self-taught in both music and visual art.

Career

She began putting out music on Myspace in 2007 under her stage name, which she chose because the site let artists name three genres and she entered "grime" for all three without knowing what the genre was. Her debut album, Geidi Primes, a concept record inspired by the Dune novels, came out in January 2010, and the second, Halfaxa, followed in October of that year, both on Arbutus Records. In 2011 she contributed five songs to the split release Darkbloom, and she opened for Lykke Li on a North American tour.

She signed with the label 4AD in January 2012. Her third album, Visions, appeared on 21 February 2012 and gave her a breakthrough. It produced the singles "Genesis" and "Oblivion", and she toured on it from 2012 to 2014. Her fourth album, Art Angels, followed in November 2015 after the single "Flesh Without Blood", and she recorded it with live instruments. She went on to tour Asia and Europe in 2016. That autumn she and the musician Hana released The AC!D Reign Chronicles, a series of seven lo-fi music videos filmed on iPhones, which she is credited with directing. In 2018 she released "We Appreciate Power", featuring Hana, and she wrote the theme music for the Netflix animated series Hilda.

Her fifth studio album, Miss Anthropocene, was released on 21 February 2020. Singles in the run-up included "Violence", "Nihilist Blues" with Bring Me the Horizon, "My Name Is Dark" and "4ÆM", with "Delete Forever" and "Idoru" coming in early 2020. She voiced a character in the video game Cyberpunk 2077 and performed "4ÆM" at the 2019 Video Game Awards. In March 2021 she signed with Columbia Records, and in 2022 she released "Shinigami Eyes". She has supported other acts on tour, among them Lana Del Rey in 2015 and Swedish House Mafia in 2022.

Her work has also drawn on visual art. She designs her own album covers, gig fliers and merchandise, has shown illustrations in galleries, and made an alternate cover for a comic book series. Her music has been placed in the electronica and art pop categories, and she is listed as playing keyboard instruments. Her record also includes the screen credits Tabula Rasa from 2011 and The AC!D Reign Chronicles from 2016.

Recognition

Visions won the Juno Award for Electronic Album of the Year in 2013, and in the same year she was nominated for the Juno for Breakthrough Artist of the Year. She also won the Libera Award for Video of the Year. The records list two awards won and two nominations. In 2013 she won the Artist of the Year award at the Webby Awards, and Art Angels appeared on several publications' lists of the best albums of 2015.

Public roles

In 2021 Grimes was named a judge on Alter Ego, a singing competition in which contestants appear as motion-capture avatars. She also co-hosts the podcast Homo Techno with the science communicator Liv Boeree, and in May 2022 she announced she was joining the board of Unicorn DAO, a group that funds work by women and non-binary artists.

Personal life

Grimes has three children. One of them is X Æ A-Ⅻ Musk.