Grimes: Visions [ARBUTUS]

Why you'll love it

This Arbutus LP adds two vinyl-exclusive tracks, "Life After Death" and "Ambrosia," with a download of the complete album. Visions won a Juno Award and was nominated for the 2012 Polaris Music Prize.

This edition

• Two LP-exclusive tracks
• Download card included

About the album

Claire Boucher made Visions alone in her Montreal apartment over about three weeks in 2011, recording the lot in Apple's GarageBand. She'd already put out Geidi Primes and Halfaxa on the city's Arbutus Records, toured as Lykke Li's opening act and signed with 4AD; she and her manager Sebastian Cowan mixed the new songs at their La Brique space. NPR streamed it a week before it came out in the United States, and 4AD issued it on February 21, 2012.

"Oblivion" is the one everybody knows, a bright, eerie pop song that Pitchfork later named the second best of the decade, and "Genesis" matches it with chiming synths and a voice layered into a choir. "Circumambient," "Eight" and "Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)" lean into the stranger, darker end, and "Skin" slows everything to a glow.

Gorilla vs. Bear named it the best album of the decade, NME ranked it the 252nd best album of all time, and it carried the do-it-yourself scene of Mile End out to the rest of the world. Proof that you don't need a big studio, though we'd still recommend a decent turntable.

Also at Kops: more Grimes on vinyl · browse CDN Pop / Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Arbutus (cat# ABT025LP), the 2012 album.