Art Angels

• Album
• Critical Reception
• Physical Release

Album

Critical Reception

Physical Release

Art Angels
Album Artwork
General Information
Title	Art Angels
Recorded	2013-2015
Released	6 Nov 2015
Genre	Electro Pop • Synth Pop • Art Pop • Alternative Dance
Length	49:37 • 14 tracks
Format	CD • digital download • cassette • vinyl • streaming
Credits
Artist	Grimes
Features	Aristophanes • Janelle Monáe
Writer(s)	Grimes • Aristophanes • Janelle Monáe
Producer(s)	Grimes
Label	4AD
Singles
REALiTi (demo) Released: 12 Mar 2015 Flesh without Blood Released: 26 Oct 2015 SCREAM (promotional) Released: 29 Oct 2015 laughing and not being normal (promotional) Released: 04 Nov 2015 Kill V. Maim (promotional) Released: 25 Mar 2016 California (promotional) Released: 01 Jul 2016
Album Chronology
(2012)
(2015)
(2020)

Art Angels is the fourth studio album by Grimes, released digitally on November 6, 2015 via 4AD and in physical formats on December 11 the same year.

The songs on the album are metaphorically referred to as 'acts'.

Background

Grimes began planning the record in 2012 as the follow-up to her third studio album Visions, however, she scrapped most of the material from those sessions and began a new set of recordings in 2014 due to the original subject matter being "depressing." She told The FADER:

❝ It wasn’t so much a scrapped album. It was just [songs] that didn’t make it onto this album. Basically, I was doing a bunch of stuff, and maybe a bit before Go, I was like, "You know, my life is getting a lot better. I’m going to put all this stuff on a hard drive and start again." There were just hundreds of songs—on this album that I’m making now, there’s at least a hundred songs that won’t make it onto this. I think all musicians have songs that don’t make it onto records. [..] Everything I made after [starting over] was 10 times better. ❞

The track REALiTi, which came from the earlier recordings, was released as a demo in early 2015, and Grimes made a decision to include a reworked and finished version in Art Angels due to critical acclaim and overall positive reception of the song.

Grimes' constant touring for her 2012 album Visions, almost led to a physical collapse, bringing her to a point where she recalled "putting a hand up and grabbing a piece of [her] hair, and [she] could just pull [her] hair out". She also became tired of how the music industry ignored her technical abilities and would focus on her being a "female musician" and having a "girly voice"; she responded to these generalizations with "yeah, but I'm a producer and I spend all day looking at f***ing graphs and EQs and doing really technical work".

The album leaked in low quality on November 4, 2015.

Inspiration

Name

In an interview with Hans Ulrich for Buffalo Zine, Grimes talked about the inspiration for the album name:

❝ I would always have these things-I would nickname them art fairies or something where, if I would do things that weren't true to myself, they would punish me and not give me inspiration. And every time I would do something. that wasn't artistically true, I would literally have these sort of creative punishment periods. And so I started feeling like I was in this weird dialogue with these spirits and I had to like, please them, or I wouldn't be able to make good art. This sounds insane. [laughs] But yeah, no, I remember rolling words around my mouth and I thought of Art Angels, and I thought that summed up what they were quite nicely. These beings that I have to kind. of feed with good creative content, or they will punish me with writer's block. I remember I was listening to this Lana Del Rey song when I got the idea, it's unreleased or leaked I think, but it's one of my favourites, called "Angels Forever". I wish she would release an official version so bad. ❞

The album went through working titles of Fairy, Avalon, and Queen of the Night (after Mozart's supernatural anti-heroine from The Magic Flute).

Composition

Compared to Visions, the songs on Art Angels were selected from a wide range of songs Grimes had produced during the time, explaining to Fuse:

❝ For me, an album like Art Angels, it's a pretty wide ranging album, like, I don't know if there's specifically, like, one message or anything that I could condense down to one sentence, cuz every song's about something completely different, and the style is pretty different on every song.

I think Visions is similar in the sense that there's not, like, one thesis for the whole thing, but it was also made over a much shorter period of time. Like, I made Visions in a couple weeks, and Art Angels took me like a year. So, in just that regard, there's a more diverse range of headspaces, whereas Visions is kinda like, you know, a lot of songs I made within a single day.

I mean, I think taking more time to write was great, just in the sense that there were songs that, four months before the album came out, they were almost a year old at that point and I was like "Ooh.". I was able to step back and look at things, and decide what was best, instead of just kind of throwing out every single thing that I made. You know, I love Visions as an album, but I do feel like there's a bit of, like, 'filler', maybe. Or, you know, there's just stuff, like, I was on a deadline, the release date was set before the album was done.

There's just unfinished things and it was really just what I made during that period. There wasn't a lot of demos. Whereas for this record, I really got to try out a bunch of different styles and try out a bunch of different things that I probably wouldn't otherwise been able to do. And just, like, choose the best stuff at the end.

Like, at one point I was like: This album has to come out before 2016.", cuz, I was like, otherwise, I would probably work infinitely. So I think deadlines are important, but I also think, you know, the songs I made, like, before last summer, like, it was a super free vibe, like, I've never been able to work with so much, feeling like: "Oh, I don't have to put anything out!" Like by the end of 2013 or 2014, people were like: "You gotta put out an album!" and it was really stressing me out. And when I just kind of was like: "Nah.", that's when I started making stuff that I thought was good. ❞

Writing

She told Dazed:

❝ Lyrically, it's more political and less abstract than before." [..] Like, really trippy free association about nature and s***. There's a song that's from the perspective of a butterfly in the Amazon as people are cutting down trees; there's a song that's from the perspective of angels who are polluted, so they're crying polluted tears. I feel like it's more about the Earth. I think I was more in society when I was making it, so it feels more grounded. ❞

Production

Grimes wrote, recorded, produced and engineered all of the tracks on the album alone after having a lack of control over production while collaborating with other artists. She began using Ableton after recording Visions entirely in GarageBand and also learned how to play the guitar, drums, keys, ukulele, and violin to explore new musical directions on Art Angels. Realizing it was "too much pressure" to pay per hour to work in a professional studio, the album was recorded by Boucher in her home studio in Los Angeles, California.

Grimes remarked in 2017 that she thought the album had too much guitar usage.

Release and Promotion

On March 8, 2015, Grimes released a music video for the demo version of her song REALiTi as a gift to her fans. REALiTi was produced during the scrapped recording sessions for an early rendition of her fourth album and not intended to be included on the final version of Art Angels. Grimes stated that the demo version which she released was "not mixed or mastered" as she had "lost the [song's] Ableton file". Despite Grimes regarding the demo as "a bit of a mess", REALiTi was well received by critics and fans, which led her to consider including a new version of the song on the final release of Art Angels. When the track listing for Art Angels was announced, a new version of the song appeared on the digital release and the demo version was included as a bonus track in the CD version only.

Grimes shared the title and cover artwork for Art Angels on social media networks on October 19, 2015 and announced that a new music video would be released the following week. On October 26, 2015, Grimes revealed that her new album would be available digitally on November 6, 2015, with releases in physical formats on December 11 in the same year. To accompany the announcement, Grimes released her Flesh without Blood/Life in the Vivid Dream music video, a digital single for Flesh without Blood and individual artwork for each track on Art Angels. SCREAM was released as the first promotional single from Art Angels on October 29, 2015, with laughing and not being normal seeing a promotional release on November 4, 2015. Kill V. Maim was released as the third promotional single on March 25, 2016, with a music video released on January 19, 2016. California followed on July 1, 2016, with the release of a music video earlier on May 9, 2016. On October 5, 2016, Grimes and her friend and singer HANA released seven videos called AC!D Reign Chronicles. The film includes Grimes' Butterfly, Belly of the Beat, World Princess part II, SCREAM, and HANA's Underwater, Chimera, and Avalanche. The final music video for the album was for Venus Fly and was released on February 2, 2017 exclusively on TIDAL, with a release on YouTube on February 9, 2017.

Album Visuals

• Album artwork
• Song Artwork
• Miscellaneous

Standard version

Japanese version

Extended version

Work in progress

Work in progress

Work in progress

Work in progress

Discarded artwork

Facebook Videos 11 Dec 2015 001

Stop-motion preview

On Tumblr, Grimes posted the artwork she had created for every single song on the album.

Laughing and not being normal

California

SCREAM

Flesh without Blood

Belly of the Beat

Kill V. Maim

Easily

Pin

Realiti

World Princess part II

Venus Fly

Life in the Vivid Dream

Butterfly

Tracklist

• Tracklist
• Scrapped Tracklist

Art Angels
No.	Title	Writer(s)	Producer(s)	Length
1.	laughing and not being normal	Grimes	Grimes	1:47
2.	California	Grimes	Grimes	3:18
3.	SCREAM (ft. Aristophanes)	Grimes • Aristophanes	Grimes	2:20
4.	Flesh without Blood	Grimes	Grimes	4:24
5.	Belly of the Beat	Grimes	Grimes	3:25
6.	Kill V. Maim	Grimes	Grimes	4:06
7.	Artangels	Grimes	Grimes	4:07
8.	Easily	Grimes	Grimes	3:03
9.	Pin	Grimes	Grimes	3:32
10.	Realiti	Grimes	Grimes	5:06
11.	World Princess part II	Grimes	Grimes	5:05
12.	Venus Fly (ft. Janelle Monáe)	Grimes • Janelle Monáe	Grimes	3:45
13.	Life in the Vivid Dream	Grimes	Grimes	1:27
14.	Butterfly	Grimes	Grimes	4:12

Art Angels — CD version (bonus track)
No.	Title	Writer(s)	Producer(s)	Length
15.	REALiTi (Demo)	Grimes	Grimes	4:27

Art Angels — Japanese version (bonus track)
No.	Title	Writer(s)	Producer(s)	Length
16.	Go (BloodPop Remix)	Grimes	Grimes	3:23

On February 28, 2015, an early tracklist was shared by Grimes on her Instagram and then quickly deleted.

1. forever fuck up
2. World Princess part II
3. Venus Fly
4. Flesh without Blood
5. SCREAM
6. LSS
7. Miami Bolero
8. Evangelion
9. California
10. Life in the Vivid Dream
11. 4 oh

Outtakes

• forever(?) fuck up
• LSS
• Miami Bolero
• Evangelion
• 4 oh
• Medieval Warfare (An "old demo" Grimes repurposed for the Suicide Squad tracklist.)

Credits

Credits adapted from the liner notes of Art Angels.

• Grimes – vocals, production, engineering
• Aristophanes - vocals (track 3)
• Janelle Monaé - vocals (track 12)
• Mark "Spike" Stent – mixing
• Geoff Swan – mixing assistance
• Tom Coyne – mastering
• Randy Merrill – mastering

Trivia

• Art Angels is the only Grimes album with a title track.
• Grimes described the album's sound as "orchestral emo production" in an interview for Pitchfork, when asked to describe it in three words.
• Jay-Z helped Grimes pick the songs to put on Art Angels.
• From the album title, angels are mystical entities that are described in Abrahamic religions as "(..) heavenly, or supernatural being[s], usually humanoid with bird-like wings, often depicted as a messenger or intermediary between God and humanity (..)". Examples include guardian angels, messengers, corruptors, leaders like Satan, Michael, Samael and others.