Grimes drops a new demo, ‘Digital Calypso’, on TikTok

Grimes has been busy recently, releasing the first single from her new AI girl group, NPC, in November, followed by what is almost definitely a break-up song about Elon Musk earlier this month. Now, the musician has also released a new demo, titled “Digital Calypso”, via TikTok.

Sharing the demo with her followers “just for fun”, Grimes says that she wrote, produced, and engineered the track alone. It also draws inspiration from The Odyssey, with lyrics such as: “I could be your Hades and you could be my Persephone.”

“Digital Calypso” isn’t all that the epic poem inspired, however; it’s also given Grimes an idea for the name of her “eventual daughter” (and future sister to X Æ A-12). “Been reading The Odyssey, wanna name my eventual daughter Odysseus,” reads a caption to the TikTok clip of her dancing, soundtracked by the new song. “Can’t tell if that’s crazy haha.”

Elsewhere in the clip, she suggests that she’s enjoyed making the demo alone amid working on an album with other musicians (it’s unclear whether this collaborative project is the lesbian AI space opera that she previously teased).

“It’s nice to remind myself I can do it by myself,” she explains, adding that she’s supposed to be working on promoting her latest single, “Player of Games”.

“I think ima retire from music, let it be my hobby, start doing tech schemes,” she claims in another caption, stating her desire to “get back indie ASAP and release everything I want whenever”.

The new TikTok post follows Grimes’ brief hiatus from posting as a result of “debilitating anxiety about being online”, which she attributes to conspiracy theories and invasions of her private life. Elaborating on this in another TikTok late last month, she also discussed how she’s perceived on social media, adding that she “somehow ended up as a kind of Marie Antoinette-esque symbol for inequality in the pop stan community”.

Listen to Grimes’ snippet of “Digital Calypso” below.