The first line of the verse in Grimes’ “Accelerando”—“Oppenheimer Barbie”—would suggest this track’s been in storage for a minute, but who am I to tell our most accelerationist pop star to speed it up? Today, she formally announced her first new album in six years, PSY OPERA, in a press release that opened with a newspaper-style dateline (“BUSHWICK, NEW YORK”) and ended with the names of the internet personalities to whom she’ll be granting interviews (Swiftologist and Adam Friedland). “PSY OPERA will cover everything Grimes witnessed as a woman of history during her hiatus from pop music,” it read. It’s so rare that one of these pronouncements is genuinely entertaining—I wish the song had the same juice.
“Accelerando” is a collaboration with producer VADAKIN, whom Grimes once described as “my Atticus Ross.” Its title evokes the accelerating pace of culture and technology and maybe also the accelerating pace of acceleration itself, alluding to the musical notation for accelerating tempo and the title of a noted science-fiction book, inspired by British author Charles Stross’ experience in tech startups during the first explosive boom of the 1990s. Grimes’ “Accelerando,” her press release goes on to explain, refers to “the feeling that the world is accelerating toward new, frightening weapons of war, lethal technologies Grimes saw foreshadowed when she embedded with Silicon Valley leaders.”
I love the rebrand of Grimes’ actual life as “embedded” here—like she held press credentials—and I also love a work of documentary art. “Accelerando” is a song from the allegorical dark side, so there is a shade of Reznor-Ross in that wobbly, arena-scaled rhythm section and melodramatic middle-section slowdown; when you hear Grimes scream you will understand why she named her new imprint Nazgul. But ultimately we’re going up against next-generation weapons with a big-room bass shuffle and some freestyle streamer jabber (“Let’s carnivore/Based, baby/Softcore”). It’s just a little too conventional for a world this twisted.
