"I'll never be your dream girl," sings Claire Boucher on "Butterfly", the final song on Art Angels, her most audacious album to date. Perhaps she's just being coy, because for many she is exactly that. In the age of the female pop auteur, Boucher's work as Grimes is a glorious addition to the canon, someone who beckons us to the dancefloor with big ideas and bigger beats, and resists simplistic notions of who she can be on a record or a stage. Art Angels is a gilded coffin nail to outmoded sexist arguments that women in pop are constructed products, a mere frame for male producers' talents—that because their music is immaculate, they are somehow not authentic. These 14 tracks are evidence of Boucher's labor and an articulation of a pop vision that is incontrovertibly hers, inviting the wider world in.
Grimes shows that Boucher is the ultimate fangirl study: a D.I.Y. musician whose love of Mariah, Katy Perry, and K-pop has expanded her palette, driven by her fascination with the possibilities of the synthetic and unreal, and ultimately given wings to Art Angels. Here, she closes the gap between the pop she's idolized and the pop she is capable of. Boucher has claimed that the record has two halves, and indeed, the songs line up most easily into beginning- and end-of-the-night dancefloor jams. The former is exemplified by the bright, anxious "Kill V. Maim", with its mocking cheerleader chant over blown-out beats and Boucher working both ends of her register in a propulsive celebration of vocal fry.
Same for "Flesh Without Blood", which is the sweetest fuck-off of 2015, one that highlights that there is much more to Boucher's voice than Visions ever had a chance to reveal. The song is Boucher eating the lunch that Miley packed, may it be #blessed with infinite stadium-EDM remixes. Post-Art Angels, it's hard to imagine anyone will reject a Boucher-penned cut: This is an album, but it's also a resume, and someone who made "California" could certainly be making crossover hits for any marquee Nashville name, while "Easily" suggests that Kesha co-writes should be in Boucher's future.
The late-night closers and their arrangements are where Boucher shows her mastery and discipline as a producer. "Realiti", "Venus Fly" with Janelle Monáe, and "Butterfly" give her a new set of peers: Sure, she's there with collaborator Monáe and Annie Clark as an auteur, but purely as a pop producer she's as deft and clever as anyone we consider a master of Top 40 craft—be it Greg Kurstin or Diplo. The songs are graced with small details: curious skeets of beats, buried samples that only appear once, toxically cute '90s pop guitar. The songs build in unexpected ways, but explode and gratify in the way we hope pop always will. "Butterfly" is a let-tonight-last-forever mutant bruiser with roiling sub-bass, the chorus's side-chained pulse making it like an uncanny valley version of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head".