Art Angels
| Grimes
Art Angels
Art Angels is the fourth studio album by Canadian singer and songwriter Claire Boucher, professionally known as Grimes. It was digitally released on November 6, 2015, by 4AD, and in physical formats on December 11. Boucher began planning the record in 2013 as the follow-up to her third studio album Visions, however she scrapped most of the material from these sessions and began a new set of recordings in 2014. The track "Realiti", which came from the earlier recordings, was released as a demo in early 2015. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
Art Angels is Claire Boucher's fourth record as Grimes and her most audacious yet: a gilded coffin nail to outmoded arguments that women in pop are mere frames for male producers' talents. These 14 tracks articulate a pop vision that is incontrovertibly hers, inviting the wider world in.
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Rolling Stone
Shape-shifting pop diva ups her game, stays delightfully weird.
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Consequence of Sound
After Visions, the only thing Grimes could do was to grow as big as the landscape around her. Here’s her mountain.
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NME
Claire Boucher retains her alien spirit on a fourth album that dabbles in pop.
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The Guardian
Renegade seeks a place in pop heaven.
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SPIN
Grimes Preaches Wonderful and Horrifying Hyperspace Gospel on ‘Art Angels’.
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Crack Magazine
Leave your sneers by the door: this is Grimes’ world and we’re all just living in it.
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The Needle Drop
Grimes returns with a diverse, well-produced pop album that's both accessible and odd.
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The Verge
On Art Angels, Grimes gives us every version of herself.
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Pretty Much Amazing
On her incredible new album Art Angels, Grimes crafts a glorious pop monster.
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The Line of Best Fit
Grimes plays fast and free with pop experiments on Art Angels.
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Pop Matters
With a healthy boost in confidence and production value, Claire Boucher makes manifest her boundless passion for the manic whimsy of pop music.
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All Music
"I'll never be your dream girl," Boucher sings on "Butterfly," but she adds "you could be anything," making the connection between honoring yourself and ignoring others' expectations clear. She does both consistently -- and consistently well -- with Art Angels' truly independent pop.
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Slant Magazine
That Art Angels is close to an hour long also signifies there’s still some room for Boucher to further focus her ambitions, but this album is the surest evidence so far that she’s game for the challenge.
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The Know
Grimes’ “Art Angels” is an ambitious pop oddity.
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Billboard
Art Angels is a marvel of meticulous, even obsessive home-studio recording, uncompromised by bandmates or collaborators.
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A.V. Club Music
It’s slick and gritty, fun and funny, and horrifying and grotesque all at once. It will also make you shake your ass like nothing else.
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Telegraph
Weird and wonderful.
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Vulture
Grimes’s Art Angels Is Superhero Music for Introverts.
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Drowned in Sound
In its ability to appeal to so many listeners, while being as thrilling on its first spin as it is on its fifteenth, Art Angels is likely to emerge from 2015 as one of the most universally adored albums of the year.
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The Atlantic
Art Angels’s weird, giddy pop songs are perfect for when you need to annihilate enemies.
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Medium
As a whole, Art Angels masterfully curates a tug of war between light and heavy ballads; a fitting juxtaposition, as Grimes was searching for a harder sound to prove to naysayers she was capable of something less “cutesy”.
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DIY Mag
With her fourth album, Claire Boucher opens up a whole new realm of possibilities, and gives the middle finger to expectation in the process.
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Exclaim!
Art Angels was worth every second of the wait.
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The Independent
With Art Angel, Canadian electropop auteur Claire Boucher, aka Grimes, completely revises the parameters and expectations set by her breakthrough album Visions: it’s not so much that she’s changed direction completely, as that she’s drained her art of the obfuscating sonic blabber to leave her pop aesthetic.
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Under the Radar Mg
Grimes manages to face mounting hype with a skillful redefinition of boundaries. It may be new territory, but she's navigating it pretty damn well.
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Northern Transmissions
Art Angels is another meteoric leap forward in terms of songwriting and sonic richness.
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Immortal Reviews
Grimes never fails to disappoint or surprise. Every track she releases is very unique and has an almost unforgettable vibe to them.
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New Noise Magazine
Art Angels is everything I want it to be. She’s inspiring on an intellectual and artistic level, expertly crafting styles together into a punk dance pop circus melee featuring a ballerina DJ.
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Sputnik Music
Reworking her style, Grimes attempts anything but what we’d expect from her on this long-awaited release. It’s a pop album through and through – but does it work?
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SLUG Magazine
With Art Angels, Boucher is not a scorned creature of pop provocation, she’s the flaming-sword-wielding guardian of pop’s playfulness.
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Mojo
Crackling with radio-primed hooks, whipsnap breakbeats and Boucher’s helium-pitched vocals, Grimes’ third album makes a convincing strike for playlist ubiquity, with a healthy dollop of the oddball chucked in.
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The AU Review
Art Angels is a stunningly weird album full of extremes. Grimes has evolved exponentially to create the record, and you most certainly haven’t heard an album like it before.
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Spartan Post News
I was a bit weary when I heard that Grimes was going a different direction with her music, but I think she’s done a great job at executing it without losing her iconic sound. I give this album a strong 7/10 and will definitely be recommending it to others.
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West Side Story
Art Angels is the unveiling of a much matured artist that has something to offer to almost any listener. This is a release that nobody should pass on.
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KRUI Radio
Grimes is the pop auteur of the year, and Art Angels is an experience you won’t want to miss.
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NYLON
If there’s any challenge to listening to Grimes as she grows, it’s only the daunting prospect of keeping up with her imagination.
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1833.fm
This album is F**king Dope simply put. Listen for yourself.
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LONDON IN STEREO
Boucher has made a perfect album.
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Journal Star
Perhaps because it’s her most accessible record or simply because it’s pop, “Art Angels” has turned off some of Grimes’ indie followers. That’s their loss. The funny, challenging, disturbing and entrancing “Art Angels” is one of the best records of 2015.
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Marcel's Music Journal
Art Angels is one of the most colossal musical tragedies of the year.
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LIKEYOUSAID
Art Angels is a brightly polished, bubbly, boisterous explosion of sound.
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Punchland
Overall “Art Angels” is an intriguing rabbit hole to go down. On the surface it is a pop album, but the deeper you go the more you realize there is a bit more to it than that.
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NBHAP
Grimes engulfs us in some sugar sweet pop with her new album 'Art Angels'.
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Ride the Tempo
Over the past few years, Grimes has been an influential force of fashion, feminism and now a total force to reckon with in pop music, while pushing the boundaries of what the future of music can be. She’s the only artist who can challenge these boundaries and remain very much within her own brand of weird.
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Clash Magazine
Claire Boucher's most ambitious and consistent work.
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The 405
Grimes will never be able to live up to your expectations, because she's too busy inside her own dreams. The art angels make for better company anyway.
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Exepose
This isn’t a great album for purists . . . but if you take it for the fun, mildly experimental pop album that it is, then it is absolutely one to buy.
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HelloGiggles
Time travel, celestial beings, and sugar pop: The weird, wonderful world of Grimes' 'Art Angels'
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Cabbage Corner
An immense pop album at that, unexpected, but undeniably catchy and replayable. And whether it becomes that final push sending Grimes into the mainstream, or it simply just sparks interest in a few new fans, Art Angels will indeed stick around.
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Courier Journal
Grimes is an original.
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Counterpoint
The album is a success in that it mines recognizable hooks to co-opt an entirely original piece. I don’t know if Jim Morrison’s prediction of the future was Art Angels, but it must be pretty damn close.
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Hotpress
Pop maven releases her catchiest collection yet.
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Speaker T.V.
If you’re looking for an unusual mash-up of genres that somehow just works, then I implore you to give ‘Art Angels’ a listen.
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Talkhouse
With her new album, Grimes creates a giant, esoteric world teeming with all sorts of poisonous Jurassic life.
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BeatRoute Magazine
Boucher doesn’t sacrifice her softness as she harnesses a power the past three years of life in the mainstream music business has brought her. Instead she brings us with her as she migrates above industry standards and into the clouds, winking away at the suits below her.
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VICE
Claire Boucher's feels like a sonic tour around the world—but it also reflects also a distinctly American brand of self-determination.
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CVLTURED
Her songs reflecting several issues within the music industry combined with the seemingly limitless and dark imagination of GRIMES herself contrasting with the bold and bright beats takes the listener on an unexpectedly delightful journey.
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The Local Joke
Each track buzzes and whirls like an electro-pixie dream, bass dubs large enough to move city blocks shift and shove, while every vocal croons with a flicker of angelic flair gone hellish. Alas this seems to be the central paradox of Boucher’s music; a beautiful and pristine voice armed to the teeth with an even sharper tongue.
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NOW Toronto
Done with trying to please people, Claire Boucher took her time with Art Angels, and the result is her weirdest and most accessible album yet.
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Vada Magazine
Art Angels . . . is deliriously mad and constantly thrilling.
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Student Edge News
On Art Angels, the halt is replaced with a strut. The subtly altered beat now rollicks and her lyrical delivery has more thrust.
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The Student Playlist
Art Angels isn’t the dismissal of what brought Grimes to the dance, it’s an extra layer, a natural step into the outer reaches of the pop stratosphere and the result is a typically unorthodox style given a brilliant, hitherto unheard level of accessibility.
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Off the Tracks
Grimes proves here to be just unusual enough.
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SEREN
The hooks are cleaner, the melodies are catchier, and crucially, it’s original.
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Sketchy Record Reviews
‘Art Angel’ is one of the oddest, but most interesting albums out this year.
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Where Y'at
Art Angels is an embrace of unadulterated and idiosyncratic pop music.
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Raw Meat
The album is a hugely bold and invigorative record, aiming and succeeding to not fit comfortably into any existing niche of the music industry, but to create one of its own.
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Best Before
rimes is the independent artists’ freedom fighter, showing the world and the industry that independent pop, in its most literal form, is achievable. May the world of redefined pop continue to rise.
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Headstuff
Grimes Unleashes The Most Dizzying, Brilliant And Batshit Crazy Pop Record Of 2015 With Art Angels.
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indie30
For us, she can take all the time in the world if she is going to create music this thoughtful, this exhilarating.
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Under the Radar
It has been three years, or several aeons for the average internet-ravaged brain, since the release of Visions, yet the new Grimes album Art Angels still merits a pause in our collective scrolling.
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The Wave
Art Angels doesn’t possess the amount of trip worthy songs we perhaps saw from Visions, but it does portray a crazy level of personalisation – something that arguably was lost on the last album.
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50Thirdand3rd
Art Angels is a unique exercise in pop experimentation from an artist who’s clearly in control of her own artistic chaos.
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Total Eclipse
Art Angels demonstrates that Grimes is far from her point of peaking. Her innovation, will to experiment and incorporate many genres of music, and passion for the craft continues to shine, and she clearly put work into this album, hardly resting on her laurels from 2012’s Visions.
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The Occasional Commentator
Hooks, infectious synths and Grimes’ incorporation of piano, guitar and violin for the first time allows Art Angels to confidently and self assuredly represent an artist who is ready to face the challenges imposed by the commercial world on an artist.
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Spectrum Pulse
Art Angels by Grimes - it's bold, colourful, kind of a mess but in the best way possible, and on occasion it hits some fantastic notes.
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Vandala Magazine
Infectiously danceable, heavily layered, seductive at times, and fun throughout.
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We Plug Good Music
Those with aversion to sun soaked pop may find this record a polarising listen at first, but Art Angels is such a starkly diverse and intriguing album, even on first listen, that it’d be hard for even the most cynical of listeners to not take something away from its vision.
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O! How the Tables Turn
Overall, Grimes did not disappoint on this album and if nothing else showed the world that her originality and musical fearlessness were not just a stunt for critics to clap at in 2012 but a vibrant part of her very being.
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The McGill Tribune
This is the Grimes album her fans were waiting for; she has kept what makes her fabulous and relatable despite her ascension to pop heaven.
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Insanity Radio
Surely Visions was more niche and alternative as it was only produced with Apple’s GarageBand in her apartment, but on ‘Art Angels’ you can actually hear that Grimes thought intensely about every song, experimenting with different genre approaches and sound mixtures and even learned to play violin and piano.
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The New York Times
Grimes ramps up her sound [on Art Angels].
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Music and Riots
She plays piano, guitar and violin, continuing her evolution as a musician and a producer for her most ambitious album to date.
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Earbuddy
It feels like the culmination of what has been always bubbling below the surface in Grimes' music.
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KMM Reviews
Grimes certainly has made a strong potential for a fan out of me, I thoroughly recommend giving this album a listen.
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IMPACT 98fm
Art Angels is without a doubt Grimes’ most accessible record to date. The album tries to have it both ways; it wants to draw upon Boucher’s prior albums and at the same time completely ignore them so Grimes can become a full on pop artist.
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Rocknuts
Art Angels is awesome and is easily one of the most intriguing and rewarding releases this year. It’s adventurous yet accessible and very much worth exploring for any listener, regardless of musical taste.
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Noted
Grimes’ fourth album is aesthetically contradictory, but in a good way.
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The Current
Art Angels is a monolithic triumph of writing, performance, production, and engineering — all of which, of course, were done by Grimes alone . . . It is art.
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AfterDark.co
A self-explorative album, proving that Grimes is a kick-ass woman with some killer tracks but one that possesses a vulnerable side, still questioning her identity in the dog-eat-dog world of music.
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MIMO
Art Angels . . . isn’t the mind-boggling sonic adventure perhaps anticipated, but it’s still a record which serves as an intriguing middle ground between Grimes’ love of experimentalism and unashamed pure pop.
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The Bagpipe
Yes, Grimes is a pop star who makes pop music, but she’s first and foremost an experimental artist who is always on the hunt for new ways to steer off the path, and Art Angels is just one of her many detours.
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Forge Press
[Art Angels is] distinctively, unashamedly Grimes, and proves that it was worth the wait.
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MUU Muse
‘Art Angels’: Grimes Rejects The Rules of Pop and Paves Her Own Path.
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Princess Loz
Art Angels is delicately crafted, fine-tuned pop, creating a record which is an obvious breakaway from Grimes’ previous witchy, dark wave sound while still keeping her roots firmly intact.
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Micah Wimmer Writes
This album is so much more than a statement made in musical form – it is also the best, most enjoyable, and distinct pop album of 2015.
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Newsday
An indie-rocker’s eclectic view of what dance music can be.
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Vagazine
Art Angels is an excellent mainstream follow-up to Visions, perfect for working out your existential woes on the dancefloor (preferably with lots and lots of dry ice fog).
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Bearded Gentlemen Music
From start to finish, Art Angels is not only Grimes strongest record yet but one of the best I’ve heard this year, or any year.
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Punknews
Art Angels exists for those who love pop but even more so for those who actively avoid it.
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The Metropolist
Like Gaga, Boucher experiments with the cult of personality that is derived from being a pop star, the only difference being that Grimes stands solely on her own two feet.
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The Financial Times
The Canadian musician teeters on art-pop’s hyphen, piling layers of production on to sugary electropop hooks.
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Kaput Mag
Grimes does not create mainstreamy chart-topping pop music – thankfully, I may add.
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Coke Machine Glow
The album was really more of the brilliant same from Boucher.
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Idolator
Art Angels is the single best argument in favor of the pop singularity. In an era when it can feel like everyone is rushing to sound “different” and fashions themselves as iconoclasts, Grimes is a true outsider.
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Gigslutz
Claire Boucher is back on form with fifteen new tracks, showcasing her ability to turn fantasy and reality in to an awkwardly beautiful, pastel-coloured aural rainbow.
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Ellen M. Brown
There’s never a moment of mediocrity nor is there empty heart-wrenching songwriting at play.
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Spectrum Culture
Art Angels is what a pop album would sounds like if you took the top 10 chart and deliberately swapped everything for unexpected patterns and instruments.
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The Monitors
Art Angels is much more balanced than her previous output, and the sequencing keeps the thing well paced.
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Something You Said
With artists like Grimes, there is hope after all.
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The Musical Hype
GRIMES DELIVERS BRILLIANT, AMBITIOUS EFFORT WITH ‘ART ANGELS’.
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Magnet Magazine
Art Angels is the sound of Grimes flying by the seat of her stylishly mismatched pants.
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PressPLAY OK
We are all in our own ways reflected in the squelching beats of Easily, we’re in the dour admissions of Realiti, and we’re certainly united in the ecstasy that comes with this being the finest pop album of the year.
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Robert Christgau
She embodies hyperfeminist individualism for a post-rock mindset that likes a good beat fine.
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KSUU Blog
Overall this album is unique, flavorful, and catchy. With the unique blend of influences and production, this is something you guys should check out. It is easily one of my favorite albums of 2015 and I will definitely be playing some tracks from this album on my show.
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The Michigan Daily
Grimes empowers on hook-filled 'Art Angels'.
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CelebMix
Grimes stuns with new album “Art Angels”.
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The Silhouette
Grimes is clearly having fun with Art Angels. Her own eclectic taste in music covers a broad range of genres and decades, from Aretha Franklin to Kanye. And despite dabbling more in the pop genre with this album, she still explores sounds and combinations many other artists would not attempt.
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The Buzz
She has created something that is undoubtedly unique and incredibly good.
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The Concourse
Grimes Is A Very Awkward Pop Star, Which Makes Art Angels Way More Fun.
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