Grimes’ latest single surprised many people, including us, as it was less space age time attack and more sitting down with some guitars. Now she’s explained what Delete Forever is actually about, and she’s done it in an official team up with Genius. 

 

It’s about friends: “My best group of friends got eradicated off the planet, and I have this weird post-war feeling, and I could not relate to anybody, because most people had not had a bunch of their friends die really violent, fucked up, scary deaths.” Specifically, it’s about deaths to drug addiction. “I’ve had six friends who’ve died from opiate-related deaths…I’ve never done heroin, but a lot of my friends were doing heroin, and I was just like ‘Woah, ok’. It’s flying too close to the sun.”

 

Then she explains the fatal connection between drugs and creativity perfectly: “The life of an artist [is] always chasing the heightened emotion, and people expect you to be living like that too… so there’s this expectation from yourself and from the outside that you need to be in a ‘fight or flight’ state all the time, and constantly accessing the darkest things that have ever happened to you… That’s one of the reasons we see so many artists dying, and shit like this going on, because people use drugs to chase the heightened state of emotion that they need to be a great performer or to be a great writer.”

 

Very true.

 

Grimes new LP is out Friday, and we are very excited.