Album: Grimes, Vision (4AD)

The label 4AD carries certain expectations for alternative music-lovers of a certain age, but Canadian artist Grimes – the alter ego of Vancouver-born experimentalist Claire Boucher – could not be further from the ethereal goth of yore.

The meringue-light and snow-bright Visions is a sort of cut-up, laptronica take on the kind of sugary, girly electro-pop confections Prince produced for a succession of female starlets in the late 1980s, and marks Boucher out as a kind of one-woman Avalanches.