Book 1 remains a work in progress, but the 15 songs Grimes has got so far represent her most audacious work yet, each song its own planet of sound?crisp California pop, club shakers, arena anthems, ethereal requiems, ?fairycore.? The album takes place in the distant future, at a stage of technological advancement when you can upload your consciousness into a robotic body and essentially live forever as a Cymek, in the parlance of science-fiction aficionados. (?I feel like Jeff Bezos is gonna be a Cymek,? says Grimes.) Her space opera?s antihero is a Cymek she calls ?the dark king,? the world?s greatest engineer, whom Grimes featured in the video for her recent single ?Player of Games.? By the time our story begins, he?s pushing 10,000.
Grimes is still hammering out the plot, but one key thread is a kind of cyberpunk spin on Swan Lake. There?s a white swan (an exaggerated version of Grimes?the dark king?s dream girl, a simulated courtesan who grows weary of being a muse) and there?s a black swan (an A.I. menace who wreaks havoc in the simulation), except in Grimes?s feminist reboot, the swans ditch the Cymek, fall in love, and fight for each other instead. From there it gets kind of complicated. ?Despite all my rage / I am still just a doll in a cage,? she sings, paying homage to Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, heroes of her wilding teens.
?We keep having this conversation where E?s like, ?Are you real? Or are we living in my memory, and you?re like a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion here?? ? If this sounds like he?s asking her if she?s a virtual pleasure bot, that?s not (entirely) what he means. Anyway, she says, she?s never felt entirely real herself: ?The degree to which I feel engineered to have been this, like, perfect companion is crazy.?
Does she mean the perfect companion for him specifically?
?Yes. Even just studying astrophysics and neuroscience. And it?s really annoying because people think I?m an airhead who went to art school.? (She actually wanted to, but it was too expensive.)