Grimes

Montreal-based artist Claire Boucher records under the name Grimes, a reference to artist Ken Grimes. She was born in Vancouver on March 17 1988 and moved to Montreal aged 18 to study neuroscience at McGill University. It was while undertaking her degree that Boucher begun to make music. She was later kicked off her course for missing classes.

Her debut album ‘Geidi Primes’ was released on Canadian label Arbutus Records in 2010, before being re-released in the UK on No Pain In Pop in 2011. Her second record, ‘Halfaxa’, was released a few months after the first’s original release. Boucher then signed with 4AD in January 2012, releasing her third and most recent album, ‘Visions’ a month later. During the making of the latter, Boucher locked herself in her room, blacked out the windows, took “tons of amphetamines, stayed up for three weeks and didn’t eat anything.”

Grimes maintains a Tumblr page, on which she writes about a variety of topics close to her heart like feminism and her experiences of being a woman in the music industry, and the effect of hard drugs on her friends and family.

In December 2013, she signed to Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s management company. In June 2014, a new song from Grimes was revealed in ‘Go’. Boucher had originally written the track for Rihanna, but she had rejected it. On her own version, Boucher collaborated with friend Blood Diamonds, whom she’d previously released the song ‘Phone Sex’ with.

She is currently working on her fourth album, expected for release in 2015.