Grimes

About Grimes

Claire Elise Boucher, known professionally as Grimes, is a Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Her work often invokes themes of science fiction, feminism, and fantasy. She has released five studio albums.

Grimes began releasing music independently after moving to Montreal, Quebec, in 2006. She released two albums, Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, in 2010 on Arbutus Records, before signing with 4AD and rising to prominence with the release of her 2012 album, Visions. The album received the Canadian music industry Juno Award for Electronic Album of the Year, and yielded two singles: "Genesis" and "Oblivion". Following this, her fourth studio album, Art Angels, was released in 2015, and several publications named it the best album of the year. Her fifth studio album, Miss Anthropocene, was released in 2020.

Grimes describes herself as progressive right. In January 2025, Grimes attended a party in Washington, D.C., alongside philosopher and Silicon Valley blogger Curtis Yarvin, to celebrate the second inauguration of Donald Trump. She has been in an off-and-on with South-African American business magnate, environmentalist, and former White House advisor Elon Musk. The two have three children together.

Grimes is a supporter of the Roko's Basilisk Theory, a prominent modern thought experiment in AI philosophy that became a cultural touchstone through its connection to Grimes and Elon Musk. The experiment, which originated on the rationalist forum LessWrong, proposes that a future, omnipotent artificial general intelligence (AGI) might retroactively punish or torture simulations of historical humans who were aware of the AI’s potential creation but failed to contribute to its development. In 2015, Grimes incorporated this concept into the music video for her single "Flesh Without Blood," staging a Marie Antoinette-inspired character she dubbed the "Rococo Basilisk," whom she described as being doomed to eternal torture by an AI. In 2018, Elon Musk intended to tweet a pun combining the 18th-century French architectural style Rococo with the thought experiment, only to discover that Grimes had executed the exact joke three years prior. This shared niche understanding prompted Musk to reach out to Grimes online, serving as the catalyst for their high-profile relationship. Grimes later expanded on these themes of AI subjugation and technophilia in her late-2018 industrial pop song "We Appreciate Power."

As of September 2025, Grimes has amassed 2.4 million followers on Instagram, 893 thousand followers on TikTok, 1.4 million followers on X/Twitter, and 1.4 million subscribers on her YouTube platform.