Credit: Grimes
Tue 19 May 2026 12:00, UK
The key to almost every overnight success is years of work behind the scenes. That’s true of Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Geese and Grimes, whose 2012 album Visions suddenly made her an industry darling, despite it already being her third record.
In the case of Charli XCX, before Brat made her a global phenomenon, she’d been a cult icon for a decade, starting out as a teenager DJing illegal raves and writing songs that Blondie recorded. For Geese, there might be all kinds of discourse claiming they’re an industry plant now, but the videos of them as kids playing local spots don’t lie.
Grimes’ origins are a little more chaotic than that, though. Before becoming booked and busy, the artist was side-questing to the max. At one point, she was hoping to finally kickstart a music career with country, only to end up attacking a man following her home with the banjo she’d just purchased. Or, in early 2012, she went on a rant about a cult she’d been part of, stating, “I’m a member of… I am the high priestess, and it’s just a realist cult that is completely centred around bureaucracy, so you can never…do anything because you’re constantly doing paperwork.”
It’s well documented by now that Grimes is an odd person, to say the least, whether it be her sharing her food habits to reveal she was once malnourished from eating nothing but spaghetti for two years, or the simple fact that she named her child X Æ A-12. But when it came to making Visions, the album that would become her industry breakthrough, the oddness served her well.
By this point, Grimes had been working away, building her fan base for years. Starting out on MySpace, people were enamoured by her strange energy as well as her early works that were rough and DIY, but experimental and interesting. It was the edge to them that people liked, enjoying that they weren’t too polished. But when Grimes was then signed by 4AD and given a strict deadline to make Visions, the pressure was almost too much.
She said she worked at a “psychotic pace”, skipping meals and basically relying on amphetamines to get it all done. She was high and buzzing, spiralling out and working, fast, and without the capacity to think all that much about what it actually was she was making. She skipped the demo phase, making most of the songs as a one-shot thing, writing and recording a track within a day and leaving it as it was. The making of Visions was a musical spiral, unlike any other major label release, where things are done with precision, patience and planning.
Later, when Grimes spoke to The Talk about the album, her reflections on it weren’t so kind. “I hate unfinished things,” she said, “My last album Visions is quite obviously amateur-sounding”.
Further reading: From The Vault
She seemed to now see it all as rough in a way that she’d never allow now, but when it comes to Visions and the music, a whole new realm of fans connected with that same roughness, which they consider to be the beauty. Visions holds Grimes’ eclectic strangeness, but it also feels honest, especially on the track ‘Oblivion’, which prompted the mass influx of attention and finds her singing about being paranoid and terrified following a sexual assault. When made during the album’s chaos, she didn’t have the space to think much about the vulnerability of sharing it.
“I make the album for me, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, fuck. Everyone else has to hear this’. I have a rule: don’t think about how to play it live. Don’t think about what other people are going to think when they hear it,” she said, maintaining to always keep hold of at least a little bit of Visions‘ crazed yet powerfully insular crafting.
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