Grimes has been in the news a lot lately, but it’s mostly been for reasons that don’t have anything to do with her music. She’s been working on a new album for a long time, and thus far, all we’ve heard is the 2018 single “We Appreciate Power.” Last night, however, Grimes came through with a new track, one that she’s quick to label as a “demo” that is not going to be part of her new album. But that’s also how she initially presented 2015’s “Realiti,” which is now one of her best-loved songs. So who knows!

In any case, like a lot of Grimes songs before it, the brand-new “Pretty Dark” exists in some mysterious no-genre hinterland. It takes bits and pieces of circa-now top-40 pop, early-’90s alt-pop, early-’60s girl-group pop, and various strains of murky bedroom music. Lyrically, it presents as a love song, but it’s full of the imagery of violent obsession: “Wish you were impaled and injured with love the way I am / You would cry when you see my tears / The way I cry when I see yours.”

The song’s video is a cheap, homemade thing, Grimes singing into what appears to be a phone camera with different filters that make it look like she’s got jewels floating around her head. But that vertical footage is superimposed in front of a bunch of much more expensive-looking sci-fi music-video footage, which Grimes claims comes “from other unreleased videos haha.” She also writes that “Pretty Dark” is a song and video that she made “yesterday,” and that it’s part of a larger project involving a character named Dark. And she says her new album is “taking too long,” so she’s going to start throwing new music up online regularly. Below, check out the video and read what Grimes has to say about it and about all the stuff she’s working on these days.

Grimes writes:

NOT A SINGLE lol
just a demo. This is from an AR musical im working on
(AKA NOT THE ALBUM/ NOT OFFICIAL GRIMES MUSIC//////)

made the song and video yesterday so obvs majorly rough,

but while im finishing my album im just gonna start casually dropping stuff as I see fit. Been doing this exercise where I try to write and produce a whole song in like ~1-2 hrs…
fuck technical proficiency and whatnot.

**** Also,
so gna start making AR (or illustrated?) ‘sub-members’ within Grimes (The art angels, as it were lol).
(Kinda like the Loona sub-bands X the Gorillaz?…
..psychedelic post k pop-ish fake band for my non-Grimes musical ventures)

_They are the main characters from the book/ musical im working on.. (AKA im bored of being so precious abt music and also feeling boxed in by the Grimes branding and I have this whole other world that’s rly fun to write for..

So I’ll save big singles and things for Grimes and casually release music more often as the AR band. )

PS… This is not her final look… but this character is named Dark.

filters by
@fvckrender
@Marcwakefieldards
@allanberger

Backgrounds were DP’d by Mac Boucher — from other unreleased videos haha

extras from the BG footage
Hana
Asy and Chloe Saavedra aka Chaos Chaos
and
JEN

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Gna start throwing demos up on yt cuz album taking too long. not a Grimes single.. just a fun vibe I made yesterday 🖤 Gna start making music under diff names when doesn’t rly fit. This project is called Dark. Iunno, I’ll explain more later. link in bio 🔪

A post shared by Grimezsz (@grimes) on Mar 13, 2019 at 9:16pm PDT