Grimes is the alter-ego of Vancouver-born one-woman band Claire Boucher. The waif-like 24-year-old has been making music since 2010, with two albums on local label Arbutus, but it's Visions, her third long-player and her first for 4AD, which has brought Grimes to wider attention.
It's a work of idyllic, sun-kissed electronic dreampop whose strangeness is amplified by the fact that if you can't always work out whether Boucher is singing in Canadian-English or Quebecois-French, it's because you're hearing neither: on current single 'Genesis', for example, a handful of half-phrases are repeated, mantra-like, until they become merely ecstatic sounds.
If the music doesn't work out, Boucher has other options: she's a film-maker and recently launched a bizarre range of jewellery consisting of moulded resin rings inspired by the shape of the vulva.
Playing: Simple Things, The Great Escape, Bestival, Field Day, Reading, Leeds
