Photograph by Paul McAdory.
Word had reached me early. Grimes, the impish thirty-eight-year-old Canadian musician and mother to three of Elon Musk’s fourteen children—who in 2018 changed her legal name from Claire Boucher to c, as in constant, as in the speed of light—would, at 10 P.M. on the night of October 10, following a surprise day-of announcement online, dance behind the decks, deejay, and play some music from her first album in more than six years in the backyard of my favorite bar, Bed-Stuy’s Singers.
The gay cocktail joint is known for programming wily meme-birthing events like “Twinks vs. Dolls” and for the variable pace of its servers, who, as queer people, reserve the right to queer the amount of time it takes to mix a drink. Tonight those servers were prepped for the influx of scenesters who’d heard about the not-so-secret event in advance, as well as the fans who found out about it organically when Grimes tweeted, at 8:06 P.M., “should I go to singers ?” One reply: “Come to Saudi Arabia.” Another: “If you go, low profile and incognito. Lotta bozos out there!”
Grimes has rarely been incognito. The electronic musician once claimed to have undergone a surgery that had given her elfin ears. She has dressed like a Tolkien character crossed with a cyborgian wastrel and may have written an unpublished children’s book titled Transhumanism for Babies. She sings in a hyperdimensional language, believes AI is sentient, and once dedicated a song to “North Korea’s Moranbong, an all female military band that plays state-sanctioned performances.” She has also released at least two of the finest albums of this century, and by 8:30 P.M., the yard behind Singers was flush with svelte, hoop-earringed zillennials who’d arrived to watch her comeback and find out if she’d made a third.
So far, it was hard to say if the new album would reach those heights. A day earlier, a press release had previewed the new album, Psy Opera—which promised to cover everything from “the AI debate to immoral wars to a bad ex to looksmaxers to the importance of religion”—but whose abrasive first single, “Accelerando,” a collaboration with the producer VADAKIN, opens by rhyming “Oppenheimer Barbie” with “American lobotomy.” (As I would later learn from Grimes herself, she didn’t think the world of the track either: “‘Accelerando’ is honestly probably the worst song on the album,” which was, she told me, her “masterwork,” “a work of genius.”)
The bar was populated by a host of quippy, tank-topped zoomers who fed me lines like “I hope she still smells like nickels,” citing the infamous leaked text sent to Grimes from her fellow lightning-rod and sometime-enemy, the Tel-Aviv-based rapper Azaelia Banks. But as partygoers continued to pour into the venue, many expressed ambivalence about the pop star. “I guess I’m only here because I would’ve wanted to be when I was twelve,” said one of a dozen gay men with dark curly hair and a trim black mustache.
Three of the author’s mustachioed friends. Photograph by Paul McAdory.
The crowd’s fondness for the luminary behind playful, prescient songs like “Oblivion” and “Delete Forever” was tempered by a lingering, potent skepticism generated by her since-lapsed alliance with Musk and her appease-the-machine-gods technooptimism. “I was on the music board of 4chan in eighth grade,” another man said. “They hated Art Angels, and I was on there defending her, and then she spat in our faces.” A lyric from the 2015 album’s standout single, “Flesh Without Blood,” summarized the prevailing sentiment: “No, I don’t see the light I saw in you before.”
Some, however, were ready to see the light anew. “I would love for Grimes to redeem herself,” said a diminutive thirty-year-old by the bar, which was serving an electric-blue “Mezcalerando” to celebrate the single. (One woman’s review: “It tastes like a failed technoutopian project.”) “I would love for Singers to become a playground for artists to redeem themselves—Nicki Minaj next!” The bar seemed like “the place to see and be seen,” an off-duty publicist agreed, before rattling off other big names recently spotted at Singers: “Julia Fox, Mamdani, and now Grimes.” The publicist, for her part, had never entirely left Grimes’s corner. “I’ve been into Grimes since I was wearing skinnies in 2012,” she said. “She has her finger on a pulse. Whose pulse, I don’t know.”
*
In the lead-up to the show, I had been texting with Grimes’s publicist about the possibility of an interview—I’d wanted to ask about her hiatus, her influences for the album, and her fraught relationship with AI. Famously, in 2023, Grimes allowed musicians to freely use an AI clone of her voice and split royalties with her team fifty-fifty. But she also doesn’t use AI to produce her music—and insists, for instance, on working with human dancers in her music videos.
I had been told, first, that she was doing no interviews, then, that she might be game for a phone call later, and finally, minutes before the show was set to commence, that she would likely give me “a quote” afterward. I was surprised, then, when the publicist, after wristbanding me in an alley beside the bar, told me I would have five minutes with Grimes in the living room of what’s unofficially known as The Singers House—the building next door to the venue, which shares its yard. I was even more surprised when that allotment ballooned into a much longer conversation with a follow-up later in the night.
Inside, VIPs and Singers personnel milled about holding cans of Asahi and dipping gingerly into crudité platters. Grimes was speaking excitedly from her perch on a gray sofa, her pink and silver vest shimmering under the overheads, the area around her eyes painted with violet, bruise-like makeup. Up close I noticed a life-size strawberry pendant hanging from her neck. “This is from a Chinese brand that I got into because they do prosthetic limbs—like fashion prosthetic limbs,” she said, “which I just think is so futuristic.” She clarified, “I have two legs, so I can’t get a limb.”
The album, she said, came out of a desire to capture the “emotion of being thrust into the future” by the pace of technology. “I think one of the things I really want to embody with this record—and I think what people don’t understand—is it’s not just cerebrally or intellectually about what’s happening. It’s about feeling it. And it’s a new feeling. I think it’s like, we’re innovating in emotions,” she explained. “Even though I think people had this before, with the Industrial Revolution, this is another level. It’s an inconceivable level of acceleration, and I think the emotional response to it is a new one. And I think it’s also horrible and terrible, and also addictive and exciting, you know?”
Grimes recently told the podcaster Swiftologist that years of waking up “in abject terror” about various plots to cancel her had, ultimately, proved freeing: the worst has already happened. And in conversation, the musician was unguarded and jocular, willing to pursue her trains of thought to unexpected destinations, from the Pope (“I love the Pope,” she said four times), to the possibility of publishing the poetry she wrote during her hiatus: “I kind of wanna get beautiful women to read it, maybe nude. I kind of wanna do really advanced pornography or something.”
While she may not publish her poetry anytime soon, she is planning to publish a manifesto, tentatively titled “Gesserit,” after the all-female enclave of superpowerful witches who plot to bring about the birth of a messiah in Frank Herbert’s Dune. The work, which Grimes is writing alongside two Zoomers—one named Lillian Tara and another who wishes to remain anonymous—is an investigation of the moral education of Gen-Z, whom she calls “the first humans ever in all of history to be raised by atheists.” (An early “pop” version of the manifesto may come out with the album, with a longer, more academic version to follow.)
She hadn’t read the work of her fellow countrywoman Anne Carson; when I recommended Autobiography of Red, she joked: “Red? Like Taylor Swift? That’s her best record.” But she had read Accelerando (the 2005 Charles Stross novel from which the single takes its name)—or at least, part of it. “It’s a great novel, which I haven’t finished because it’s a nightmare,” she told me, “but it’s a masterpiece.”
The single “Accelerando” was “based on how I felt when I learned about autonomous capital,” she added, referring to a complex set of ideas that, roughly, posit capitalism as a kind of intelligence making temporary use of human beings until it can produce a singularity. “I think Nick Land invented it first, but I first encountered it with that book, and it just struck this fear into me—I was just hit with this deep fear and excitement about the future at the same time.”
At times, Grimes’s conversational freedom elicited input from her publicist, Mitchell Jackson, a tall, bespectacled flack whose client roster includes Adam Friedland, Clavicular, and Candace Owens, and whom the New York Times dubbed “the publicist on call for controversy.” When she brought up Land, the neoreactionary accelerationist philosopher who coined the term “Dark Enlightenment” and is beloved by the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Jackson chimed in: “Let’s not discuss Nick Land.” And when I asked about her long-standing affinity for elves, she turned to Jackson: “You’re going to hate my answer.”
“As I said,” he responded, “you’re allowed to say whatever you want as long as you know the consequences.”
“Tolkien always said that one of the worst things the Nazis did was destroy, like, the aesthetics of the Nordic people, you know?” I did not know, not really, not about this and not about much of the remainder of her answer to this question:
I think it’s really causing a lot of nihilism and horror in society—the fact that so much of Western and Northern European culture is now just being associated with this horror, especially when a lot of people from these cultures fought against it. I started getting into the elf stuff because I got very canceled, very heinously, early in my career for wearing a bindi—which I shouldn’t have done, but my stepdad’s Indian, so, you know, I liked wearing a bindi. But I was like, ‘Yo, okay, I’ll just get into, like, white people culture.’ And then I started realizing in America that’s very fraught. I’m from Canada. I think there’s a lot less trauma around this there.
Healing, she said, was the order of the day, and her pointy-eared aesthetic might aid that process: “If the way that the culture was before causes people trauma, then I think there’s new ways to do it, such as: cyber elf.”
(At this point, Jackson interjected to note that he “always would prefer if a client doesn’t say the words ‘white culture,’ ” leading Grimes to specify that she was referring to Western and Northern European cultures.)
If, before the show, there were already rumblings of discontent typical of an event involving a fallen celebrity artist on the comeback and a flock of bitchy gay men and the women who associate with them, this was perhaps not the ideal conversation to assuage their misgivings. But conversation was not what the crowd had come for. They’d come for Psy Opera, which Grimes described as “a double album probably” of “cerebral, lyric-oriented” tracks that sound like “girly Radiohead.” “I suffered a lot to make this,” she added. “I hope people appreciate it.”
At various points in our conversation, Grimes inventoried her concerns with AI and the tech scene more broadly. “I keep trying to show my AI friends my art or other people’s art,” she said. “And I started realizing that they don’t like art, which was shocking to me.” As Grimes spoke, moving her hands through the air, she looked as though she was still reeling from the revelation. “They don’t like music, dance,” she went on. They “don’t necessarily feel art. Which is, like, fine. I don’t judge people for not feeling art.”
Photograph by Peeg.
But for all their grumbling, if anyone wanted to feel her art, this crowd definitely did. When Grimes took the stage, her long platinum locks shone in the swiveling stage lights. She could have been cosplaying as the anime elf Frieren. In a normal word, she looked angelic. In the argot of homosexuals, as one endearing man told me, she looked “so puss-puss McGuss, plucked and pickled.”
From the moment she cued the second track, Donna Lewis’s “I Love You Always Forever,” all seemed to be forgiven. I admit that I am the target audience for a Grimes redemption arc; tears come into my eyes remembering how individual lines from her music have filled me with feeling. (“I was only looking for a human to reciprocate,” she sings in “Pin,” from Art Angels: Genuinely, who isn’t?) Grimes played only two or three of her own songs, including “Accelerando” and another track she said would “never be released.” She opted instead for an eclectic mix of throwback bangers—Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” had the at-capacity crowd leaping in delight—and neo-Grimesean dubstep-influenced pop like Ninajirachi’s “Fuck My Computer.”
Her most inspired selection was “212,” the era-defining hit by Azaelia Banks. Grimes threw her body around the small stage and mouthed the lyrics through an implacable smile, as two hundred voices shouted them back to her (“I guess that cunt gettin’ eaten.”) If you’re looking to win back a disgruntled public, having a sense of humor about your cultural legacy doesn’t hurt. At the tail end of her penultimate track, “I Wanna Be Sedated,” she told the crowd: “Everyone should just be calm now. Get eight hours of sleep,” before walking offstage to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “Je t’aime … moi non plus.”
I don’t know what people will think of Psy Opera, but a woman guiding her sloshed friend into the bar after the show spoke for many, when she stopped me to say, “I’m kinda drinking that Canadian Kool-Aid.”
Paul McAdory is a writer from Mississippi. He last wrote for The Daily about sperm racing. He lives in Brooklyn.
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