Sun-Bleached and Wrong

Genesis, from Grimes’ Visions, sounds like it was recorded inside someone else’s dream and accidentally released. Claire Bouchard layered her own voice into something barely recognizable—harmonic clusters hovering between choir and synthesizer—over production that feels intentionally degraded, like the signal is traveling from somewhere very far away. The video matched: sun-bleached, vaguely apocalyptic, beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when something is clearly wrong. As a piece of music it asks how far you can push bedroom production before it stops being music and starts being atmosphere. The answer, apparently, is further than you’d think.