The musician also discusses her post-human podcast and TV show, and why gaming culture is ‘less toxic’ than indie stan culture
Earlier this month, Grimes revealed that her next album will be a space opera that revolves around a lesbian AI romance. Now, the musician has expanded on the upcoming project, as well as her Homo Techno podcast and recently-announced TV show, Alter Ego.
The new information comes in an interview with Billboard, about Grimes’ role in a short film released by Discord, which sees her perform a snippet of “Shinigami Eyes” — a song previously teased during a chat with fans on the platform — in a medieval tavern. Awkwafina, Danny DeVito, and J Balvin also star.
According to Billboard, Grimes intends to share more unreleased music on her “Metaverse” Discord server tomorrow (July 25), as part of an afterparty for the virtual festival Splendour XR. Explaining her preference for the game-centric platform, she says: “The more I get into the gaming community, it’s a lot less toxic than the indie music stan community.”
“Everyone’s going to laugh at me saying that gaming culture is less toxic than indie stan culture, but it’s kind of true, frankly, having lived in both extensively.” She goes on to describe Discord as a “more healthy social media” and says that it aligns with her goal to “remove the toxicity” from the fan experience.
Besides plans for virtual gatherings, Grimes says that she’s set to start releasing singles from her new album soon, adding: “I think we’re going to start dropping singles this summer and then just keep dropping singles, and then put the album out four, five, six singles in or something.”
This week, Grimes teased the single “100 Percent Tragedy” on social media, though she says her label doesn’t want to release it.
What can we expect from the album as a whole? Well, Grimes says the record is “pretty different” from 2019’s Miss Anthropocene. “It’s sort of a concept album, so it does have a narrative,” she adds. “With my last album, I had a lot of big ideas, but I just let it be more impressionistic. With this album, I think I have a lot more to say. I feel very strongly about the material.”
Presumably, she’ll discuss more of those big ideas in her upcoming podcast, Homo Techno, with her friend and fellow AI enthusiast Liv Boeree. The thesis, she says, is that we’ve moved beyond homo sapiens to become “full cyborgs”, and the podcast is set to investigate “the most aggressively controversial theories about futurism”.
Alter Ego, the televised singing competition she’s signed on to judge alongside will.i.am, Alanis Morissette, Nick Lachey, and Rocsi Diaz, explores post-humanism from a different angle, aloowing contestants to perform as their “dream avatars” via motion capture technology.
“No one has a body, and no one is bound by their age or gender or anything like that,” Grimes says. “I’ve been really enjoying that, because we’ve lived in a society for so long where you’re stuck in the shell that you’re in, and you just have to deal with it.”
“We might be about to enter a new reality where we can all live to the potential of our brains.”
Watch Grimes in Discord — The Movie above, and catch a snippet of her virtual performance below.