To say I love grimes is an understatement.
Despite finding her fairly late in the game (2020), she soon became my obsession. Here was this very synthy, very ethereal, very chaotic creature with a million sounds. I came in as Miss Anthropocene dropped. It was beautiful. But then contrast that to Halfaxa and you have 2 very different soundscapes. I was hooked.
I was a total fangirl. I wanted to play Cyberpunk because she voiced Lizzy Wizzy. I watched the Musk (boo) SNL episode because I knew Grimes was on it. I started reading Dune because of the Geidi Primes album. The only thing I look up on X is her. I got into Anyma’s futuristic sets because she dated Anyma. This very blog is a result of me gathering magazines with her face on the cover.
When Grimes drops a new song the world, or at least my household, stops and listens. My husband joked this morning ‘Great… so we have something new to listen to for the month.’ Rude. Accurate, but rude.
Grimes Drops Artificial Angels (and the Internet Loses Its Mind… Sort Of)
On October 17th 2025, Grimes dropped Artificial Angels with almost no warning. Even my chronically online backside only heard about it the day before, a strange collage leaked on Instagram, a mysterious Spotify page with a release date. The Grimes Reddit wasn’t convinced it was real. Was it a promo for the ten-year anniversary of Art Angels? Another one of those Grimes promises (looking at you, Book 1)?
But honestly, that’s so Grimes-coded. She’s talked before about her struggles with the idea of “Grimes” the celebrity vs Grimes the artist. She’s openly admitted she hates singing live, so big promo cycles and polished PR are behind her.
It all feels very early-2010s again- dropping something on the internet without warning, no algorithmic buildup, just chaos and curiosity. It’s Tumblr-core marketing: gossip as promotion.
What Is Artificial Angels About?
Now, I understand the phrase “it’s not that deep.” I get that sometimes people over-analyse. But I beg your forgiveness when it comes to Grimes. Her obsessive love of AI, her trans-humanist musings, her god-complex lyrics- it’s basically begging to be unpacked.
“Artificial Angels” feels like Miss Anthropocene met Art Angels in the middle of a digital exorcism. It’s Grimes at her most cyber-religious.
Lyrically, it’s a hymn for the end of the world, told from the perspective of something post-human. Maybe an echo to what she refers to as homo-techno- a new, upgraded species of humankind?
The intro threatens you-
“This is what it feels like to be hunted by something smarter than you”.
Is it the AI? Is she threatening the machine? Is she threatening me? It’s cool af whatever it is.
The refrain, ‘Inhalation, exhalation, exhale annihilation’, reads like a digital mantra, existence reduced to circuitry. She loves these ideas. We saw this in ‘My Name is Dark’ (Imminent Annihilation sounds so dope.) And then there’s that line:
“Power isn’t given, it is taken.”
That could be Nietzsche, could be a hacker manifesto, could be a pop lyric, and that’s exactly why it’s Grimes perfection.
Even the religious imagery is weaponised. “Artificial angels pray” suggests divine imitation, AI as humanity’s new creation myth, a self-aware reflection of God’s hubris. Later she asks:
“What’s a power above even a king? (God)”
“What’s the origin of everything? (God)”
“God is dead.”
It’s straight Nietzsche, filtered through a motherboard. She’s questioning who gets to be divine when machines start to think.
By the outro, when the voice pleads “Wait, no, stop” and the opening line repeats (“This is what it feels like to be hunted by something smarter than you”) it loops back into that paradox. Grimes has built her own angel, and maybe it’s coming for her too.
Gold. Love it.
The Grimes Artificial Angels Artwork Is Pure Chaos (and I Love It)
The Artificial Angels artwork is a brain dump mid-meltdown. It’s what happens when your Pinterest board, Reddit feed, and 3 a.m. existential crisis all collide in Photoshop. So… very Grimes.
Front and centre, Grimes is sprawled out in icy-blue lighting, half-angel, half-influencer. Around her? Crypto charts crashing, apocalyptic headlines, and memes about AI pop stars being the death of humanity.
And just when you think it couldn’t get more unhinged. Yes, she even puts a Charlie Kirk reference on there. She’s mocking the way people exploit celebrity to pump crypto that inevitably fails. It’s hilarious because she knows even mentioning it will piss people off. She’s baiting the outrage machine and watching it eat itself. Very AI. Very Internet.
One headline even reads:
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”
Straight out of Dune, where humans banned AI after the “Butlerian Jihad.” Basically: don’t play God. So naturally, Grimes plays God.
(I blogged about how important the prequels were. I bloody meant it. See it here.)
And yeah, that is the OpenAI logo on a pack of cigarettes? You bet your ass it is. Because of course AI is the new addiction, the new vice. She’s turning Silicon Valley into a religion and herself into the blasphemy at its centre.
Every little piece of the collage screams contradiction. “Grimes in her fascist era?” sits beside “RIP K-Pop: Higgs first AI idol.” Stock graphs next to saints. It’s hilarious and horrifying at the same time, like watching someone livestream the apocalypse from their bedroom studio.
There’s something genius about how self-aware it feels. A digital angel surrounded by her own machine worshippers, half-joking, half-prophetic. If the Dune commandment said “don’t make machines that think,” Grimes looked at that and went, “Cool. What if I make them sing instead?”
Final Thoughts on Grimes – Artificial Angels
Grimes exhausts people: the AI takes, the weird posts, the Elon connection. I get it. She’s not popular in 2025. But when she drops something like Artificial Angels, it reminds me why I fell in love with her chaos in the first place. She makes the end of the world sound divine.
Philosophy, AI, apocalypse, all roads lead back to a Grimes poll.
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