Marcel Winatschek

What Claire Boucher Was Building in 2012

Grimes put out Visions in January 2012 and spent the rest of the year being the thing everyone was trying to describe. The production was bedroom-scale but the ambition wasn’t—pop music made from the inside out, all texture and drone and that voice sitting just slightly wrong in the mix in the way that turns out to be entirely right. The aesthetic leaned into the feral and the body-conscious and the genuinely strange in ways that felt new then and still hold up. Whatever this post was originally pointing at, she was the reason you kept clicking.