Art Angels.
| Grimes
Art Angels.
Art Angels is the fourth studio album by Canadian musician Grimes. It was digitally released on November 6, 2015, through 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, for unknown reasons, 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
Her lyrics stretch broad enough to curtain anything, but the fractured wisps of her voice coil around one feeling in particular: the wonder at being subsumed into something bigger than yourself. 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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The Guardian
renegade seeks a place in pop heaven.
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Spin
It’s a triumph of Grimes as gloriously and unapologetically DIY producer, a pop singer politically and emotionally invested in your knowing that she made this all on her own — as if anything workshopped with a team of songwriters could sound so bracing and unpredictable.
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Crack Magazine
While Art Angels is a thrilling listen by design, some songs can’t carry through the excitement of some of the bigger sounds on the album. Pin, California and Butterfly all sound a little too radio ready, missing out on the strangeness that’s made Grimes a true alt pop adventure. Despite these minor, skippable hiccups though, Art Angels’ overarching lesson is that it’s okay to like what you like, even if you’re a Dolly Parton fan who’s into J-pop and medieval Mongolia (just like the defiantly nerdy Grimes). Leave your sneers by the door: this is Grimes’ world and we’re all just living in it.
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The Verge
Grimes has made an album that questions its listeners’ sanity and throws their own demands back at them. The tactic of Art Angels is to confuse you until you’re convinced the weird thing you’re experiencing is pleasure.
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The Line of Best Fit
avant-garde pop favoring an interplay of menacing, low-end dance beats and warped vocals. It was the type of music that flirted with the mainstream but always kept it at a distance.
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PopMatters
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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AllMusic
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 Denver Post
Grimes’ “Art Angels” is an ambitious pop oddity.
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AV Club
It’s the entirety of everything Grimes has tried to accomplish on Art Angels in one four-minute package. 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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The Telegraph
weird and wonderful.
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Vulture
Grimes' Art Angels is Superhero Music for Introverts.
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Drowned in Sound
It’s all utterly irresistible. It’s difficult to imagine anybody who would actively dislike this record, being as immediate as the top 40, while packed with dense, detailed surprises, and plenty of visceral snarl. It can sit next to Taylor Swift’s 1989 and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion, as well as this year’s most challenging electronic compositions. And 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 Magazine
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. Whether it makes a dent in the mainstream like so many people have predicted or not is beside the point. Grimes has given us a complete record that's everything pop should be in 2015: utterly uncompromising, imaginative and, somehow, universally accessible.
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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 Magazine
It feels like an art project, exploring new sounds and structures that are more familiar to mainstream audiences, but completely reinvented in Grimes’ aesthetic. Even though these are clear pop songs, there are no hooks but rather a sense of self-confidence and wholeness. 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 the kind of album that can venture into Taiwanese punk-rap on the Aristophanes-assisted “Scream,” pastoral folk on the bite-sized interlude “Life in the Vivid Dream,” and cheerleader chants on the blood-splattered bubblegum “”Kill V. Maim.”” without coming across as gimmicky or unfocused. Amidst these unpredictable soundscapes, the choruses are so catchy and touching that it’s easy to forget just how weird this music is, and that’s what makes it such a thrill.
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Immortal Reviews
The Fever Dream That Is Grimes' "Art Angels" Is The Future Of Pop.
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New Noise Magazine
The new Grimes album is a statement reflective of herself, and does not waver from her strengths. In fact she has built upon them, and showed that she is capable of weaving together a killer album with cool shit from out of nowhere.
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Sputnik Music
Flesh without Blood is a literal description for this album – Grimes has the right idea but needs to breathe life into it and give it the touch of her personality that brings about the beloved quirkiness and unpredictability that made Visions so successful.
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Slug Magazine
Boucher is defiant of pop’s bureaucracy, yet, as with all of Art Angels, delivers everything that we expect from our guiltiest of pleasures. 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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West Side Story
Art Angels is a happier, upbeat side of Grimes that will shock the old fans before drawing them back in while also attracting a whole new group of fans. 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
Art Angels is the Kill la Kill (an excellent series that critiques and homages magical girl anime) of the audio world. Grimes has created two exemplary and subversive albums, all on her own terms. 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
There’s an extraordinary range to the 14 songs on Art Angels (and she apparently has hundreds to choose from), but from the easy mid-tempo jam of “Easily” to the the beautifully frail “Life in the Vivid Dream” to the abrasive/addictive “Kill V. Main” (in which she growls “THEY DON'T! KNOW! ME!"), they all feel like views from the same vision—but it may be up to you to properly adjust your perspective.
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1833.fm
This album is F**king Dope simply put. Listen for yourself.
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London in Stereo
Basically, Boucher has made a perfect album. This is one of the best albums you’re ever likely to hear. If pop music, like the classroom, is a constant cycle of repetition, then Boucher is the one who comes along and reinvents the wheel. She’s the little girl in the corner who spends her time drawing – the one with strange and esoteric passions, a lovable oddity. That little girl grew up. She had to grow up eventually. But she never stopped drawing. She never stopped expressing herself.
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Punch
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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Clash Magazine
When Lady Gaga swiftly exited the scene a few years back, not only did she leave a rotting cape made of offal in her wake, but the rejection of artists being weird for the sake of being weird. No doubt there were a lot of sceptical ears expecting 'Art Angels' to be exactly that. It’s not. It’s also not the diluted, crowd pleaser that others had predicted when she signed a deal with Jay Z’s Roc Nation. This is the truest representation of Grimes we’ve heard yet: 'Art Angels' is boundary pushing, it’s listenable and it’s Boucher’s most ambitious and most consistent work to date.
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HelloGiggles
Grimes gambled with expectations on this album, and she didn’t just beat the house — she burned it down and built her own universe up again from the ashes. Art Angels is bigger and better than what came before, Grimes coaxing her audience out of the darkness and into brilliant, dazzling light.
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CabbageCorner
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
Dance music is at the heart of “Art Angels,” moving from thunderous bass lines to light and airy grooves, sometimes within the same song, as in “Venus Fly” with Janelle Monáe, but Grimes approaches it with an indie-rocker’s ear. The result sounds experimental, but also organic, giving the grooves a soulful quality that isn’t always present in more polished club-bangers. Above all else, 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 TV
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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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
The rest of Art Angles is evident of GRIMES experimentation in genre and exploration into her own range of sound, each track draws influences from genres such as pop, electronic, soft rock, soul, and J-pop to create an album that is energetic, eclectic, and highly addictive. 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
Art Angels accelerates into its femme art-pop aspirations with titles like “Realiti”, “World Princess part II”, and the bumping “Venus Fly” which finds Grimes in good company alongside Janelle Monae. A ravishing kiss-off, Boucher and Monae attack the patriarchy with claws out and eyes burning.
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Vada Magazine
Art Angels, then, is deliriously mad and constantly thrilling. Grimes has made an album that isn’t comparable to what could now be considered her new contemporaries (did anyone really expect her to?) but instead shares the same grandiose and risk-taking bravado of some of the best pop records of the last 25 records.
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Now Toronto
Art Angels is a major victory for deep weird.
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Student Edge
On Art Angels, the halt is replaced with a strut. The subtly altered beat now rollicks and her lyrical delivery has more thrust. "Welcome to reality" suddenly seems less defeatist and more determined. On Twitter, she described it as being “from a diff era.” I dunno. This sounds like the new Grimes to me.
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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
There’s piano balladry (Easily) and driving anthems (Pin), there’s a whiff of those obvious presets in some of the productions (Realiti) but there’s a class Grimes possesses now, the years between records suggest so much time spent getting things right…I feel like Art Angels is spiritual successor to Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual. Something Lauper couldn’t quite manage. Grimes proves here to be just unusual enough.
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Sketchy Record Reviews
‘Art Angel’ is one of the oddest, but most interesting albums out this year. The album is another certain to gain spots on many top 10s, which is interesting to see so many newer artist acheive this year.
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Where Y'at
It's a kiss-off to critics, detractors, fake friends and gross men. The imagery is boundless; from a reimagining of Al Pacino as a gender-switching space vampire to a three-song sequence about a dead friend. But, most importantly, Art Angels is an embrace of unadulterated and idiosyncratic pop music.
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Raw Meat
Art Angels is completely and utterly wonderful. 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
‘Art Angels’ is a testament to Boucher’s burgeoning capability, and with attitude no less, showing that all her ambitious creativity and obsession with detail can in fact pay off. Known as the girl who doesn’t care what critics say, ‘Art Angels’ is incontestable proof that Boucher is the master of her domain. She has skillfully crafted a pop album that is bursting with artistry, yet possesses a depth that her sparkly peers sometimes struggle to achieve. All in all, Grimes 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. And if anybody was in any doubt as to her almost manic search for intellectual pop perfection twinned with her humble honesty, two things stand out right at this minute - the fact that she culled an albums worth of tracks in the making of the record for not coming up to her impossibly high standards and that she posted this on twitter last night. We'll leave the final word to her.
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50thirdand3rd
There’s songs that would fit in your workout playlist, an underground club, glow-stick lit festivals, and maybe even a vampire rave found in any good Anime. If you are looking for something in the pop genre that is not fueled solely on sex or attention seeking theatrics, look no further than Grimes. Art Angels has already proven to be one of the better pop records of the decade and an LP I’m sure I’ll be spinning on my turntable for a very long time.
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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. It’s certainly refreshing to see a young artist’s creative spirit so prominently in their music, and I hope to see this trend continue as Grimes continues to pursue her passion.
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Vandala Magazine
Infectiously danceable, heavily layered, seductive at times, and fun throughout. This could be the release that pushes Grimes beyond just the world of pitchfork, college radio, and into that song you liked in a commercial and had to Shazam. This album could forge her place in the world of big time venues, and possibly even a top 40 crossover.
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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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The McGill Tribune
The result is a complex and layered album as a whole, with production that has a lot of stylistic flourishes that come out through repeated listens. Grimes has talked repeatedly about her frustration with male producers trying to push her to the sidelines, and this album serves as a middle finger to all of them, both in concept and through its excellent production. 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
With these confident breaks, melodic hooks and the tightrope walk between mainstream and niche, Grimes succeeds in creating a unique music experience. And I advise everyone who refuse to listen to an artist album because they got “too mainstream”, to just think outside the box and as Grimes perfectly summed up, just accept the beauty of music without addressing perceived musical ambitions.
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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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Impact
Art Angels 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. It simply doesn’t work, it leads to a confusing mess of an album and no amount of personal quirkiness is going to change that. There are standout tracks to be found on Art Angels but as a complete album it stumbles on its ambition.
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After Dark
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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The Bagpipe
People forget that pop music is just a shortened term for “popular music.” Claire Boucher isn’t afraid to use the popular as well as the unpopular to achieve a response from her listeners. 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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princessloz
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. It’s clear that Grimes is much more secure today than she was at the time of her previous projects, remaining just as dream-like as Visions but instead of it’s strangely beautiful medium of drowning the listener in bittersweet gloom, the LP successfully transports the listener to a fantasy, 80’s synth pop heaven – and that’s even without considering the recurrent angel theme referenced throughout.
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Writings on Theology, Basketball, and Culture
Yet 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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Vaga Magazine
Grimes proves you can be cute and tough. Artful, yet still popular. Personal, yet speaking to a wide group of people. 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. Maybe in a year we’ll be asking how she can top herself or if her Great Lost Record is some kind of masterpiece or whatever she’s been posting about online. But for now, I’m glad “Realiti” was more than a one-off single. Strongly recommended.
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Punknews
Theres a lot to be said for someone altering the rules the way Grimes does. She leaves plenty to grab onto, but explicitly keeps her distance from normalcy. Grimes stays on the outside looking in, comfortable in her own ability to make the party move. Shes self aware and independent. She proves pop doesnt have to be drab and, instead, can be thoughtful and boundary pushing. Art Angels exists for those who love pop but even more so for those who actively avoid it.
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Kaput Magazine
It is cheesy and crazy and a hit and artsy – it is pretty much everything the record before was and what “Art Angels” is trying to achieve at once. If Grimes continues like that then that’s great.
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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. In an era when we have trouble admitting that, sometimes, a pop song is just a pop song, Grimes has provided us with cerebral singalongs that demand to be unpacked. So many artists and producers in recent years have tried to jump the gap between the center and the fringe, but with Art Angels Grimes figured out how to flourish there.
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Gigslutz
Art Angels may be pop-heavy and perhaps lacking the stand out singles fans saw on Visions – ‘Oblivion’ and ‘Genesis’ will take some beating – but Grimes’ blend of celestial and sinister sounds will still please pre-existing fans; and introduce new listeners to Claire Boucher’s fantastically awkward ‘Realiti’.
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Spectrum Culture
While Grimes’ previous work dabbled in avant-garde electronica and pop vocals seemed to serve only as a plaything with which to mock her contemporaries, Art Angels has her not only embracing a wide range of pop styles but absolutely excelling at it. Art Angels feels odd on first listen, but it slowly becomes a stylistic pinball machine of a record — one which racks up a high score very, very fast.
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The Monitors
As an album, Art Angels is much more balanced than her previous output, and the sequencing keeps the thing well paced. As a pop album it’s probably everything Grimes wanted it to be; better than Swift’s constant self-congratulatory register, better than the tedium of British pop music’s obsession with lowest common denominator rhythms, and certainly more entertaining than much of what does the rounds in the charts. It also sounds one hundred percent honest; it’d be hard for the songs to sound this open-armed if Boucher was just following the dollar.
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Something You Said
Grimes will never be a pop-star created by a spoiled cultural image; she is unquestionably herself. Writing, producing, and directing her own pop sound, she is re-directing the genre to new and exciting heights. With artists like Grimes, there is hope after all.
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The Musical Hype
Alternative musician Grimes delivers a confusing, yet brilliant and ambitious effort with her 2015 album, Art Angels.
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Magnet Magazine
The world is simply catching up with her, which is how tracks as willfully eccentric as “Easily,” “Artangels,” “Belly Of The Beat” and “California”—what with their airy, breathy choruses, fractured breakbeats and IRL instrumentation (guitars! tack piano! a freakin’ string section!)—could end up forming the soundtrack to your next sitting-there-stuck-in-traffic-on-the-405 radio moment. Art Angels is the sound of Grimes flying by the seat of her stylishly mismatched pants.
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KSSU
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
Art Angels is an average record put out by someone with an immense amount of talent. Had Grimes not wowed audiences with her earlier work, her new release would not come as such a disappointment. The hits on Art Angels do not make up for the misses, but they give the listener traces of the creative, genre-bending Grimes we know, love and miss.
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WSBU
Grimes has been compared to a blend between Katy Perry and K-Pop, which is the perfect definition of what this whole album sounds like. She has created something that is undoubtedly unique and incredibly good.
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Deadspin
Grimes Is A Very Awkward Pop Star, Which Makes Art Angels Way More Fun.
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