Claire Boucher and the Music She Made in the Dark

Grimes recorded Visions in a Montreal apartment over a few sleep-deprived weeks, and Nightmusic is one of its more quietly unsettling pieces—built from layered voice loops that accumulate into something that almost functions as a lullaby, if lullabies were designed for people who can’t stop thinking. Claire Boucher’s vocal processing is the center of gravity: multiple versions of her own voice stacked and shifted until they become their own small choir, the lyrics dissolving at the edges where you try to parse them.

What makes early Grimes so hard to shake is the texture—everything sounds slightly wrong and completely right at the same time. The production has that quality of something made by one person in total isolation, all the decisions filtered through a single sensibility with no one to sand the edges down. Visions came out in early 2012 and the internet spent months trying to name the genre. That conversation already feels dated. The music doesn’t.