Grimes has shared the first song from Psy Opera, her first album in six years and her first on her own label. The record’s AI premise arrives as both subject matter and argument.
Grimes has released “Accelerando,” the first single from Psy Opera, the AI-themed album she described in an April interview and which still has no announced release date. The title likely nods to Charles Stross’s 2005 science fiction novel. The lyrics include “American lobotomy ya a a a” and “Better than a Van Gogh? / Eat me if u wanna ya yayaya.”
A press release describes the album’s scope bluntly: “From the AI debate to immoral wars to a bad ex to looksmaxers to the importance of religion, Psy Opera will cover everything Grimes witnessed as a woman of history during her hiatus from pop music.” That hiatus has lasted six years, since 2020’s Miss Anthropocene. Psy Opera will also be her first release on Nazgul Recording LLC, the label she launched after leaving Columbia.
The AI framing is not new for her. In 2024 she appeared on the PBS series A Brief History of the Future and called AI an “opportunity” for musicians, arguing that when professional-grade tools are available to everyone, “you get to see the actual talent, like, really rise to the top.” The year before, she offered 50 percent royalties to anyone who made a successful AI-generated song using her voice.
Alongside the single, she has opened an Instagram channel called “Eve Is Online” and shared a Psy Opera trailer that recasts the Gospel of John in dystopian terms. Whether the album’s ideas hold up as music is the open question; for now the concept is doing the announcing.
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