Canadian musician and singer Grimes has returned with “Shinigami Eyes,” the next installment from her forthcoming project. The Canadian singer released the dark-yet-poppy track with a video on Wednesday (Jan. 26), and gave BLACKPINK fans a Jennie cameo in between scenes of intergalactic warfare, lightsaber-wielding and futuristic fashion moments.
Shinigami Eyes, the first track released from Grimes’ upcoming EP, “Fairies Cum First,” was officially released on January 26th, 2022. The song was first teased by a Twitter post of Grimes, which was written in binary code.
The next day, Grimes shared a 1-minute long snippet of the song through a livestream on her Metaverse Discord Server. After this Grimes has made several TikToks using this song as the audio. It is believed that it will be the first single of G6.
In the video, Grimes’ lover is also her deadly opponent. The pair shares multiple embraces, only for the man to turn on her and shoot an arrow through her stomach. Jennie later appears alongside Grimes atop a vehicle traveling to a different dimension, posing for pictures and modeling a neon pink jacket and matching pants with a mirror bra top. The “Player of Games” musician then finishes off her lover in front of a live audience and sucks his soul from his body.
Grimes has replied to a comment on her TikTok account explaining that her label will release the song if the videos she posts on TikTok reach 20 million views combined. Her’ music has incorporated elements of varied styles, including dream pop, electronic, R&B, and hip hop, while touching on science fiction and feminist themes.
The 33-year-old released the official trailer for the visual on Tuesday and praised Jennie’s admirable work ethic on Instagram, telling a fan in the comments she has “never seen such a pure talent on set” and that “everyone was like, ‘wtf she’s so good at performing.’”
Grimes has yet to share full details about her next project — which is tentatively titled BOOK 1 — but spoke to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 about it potentially being a double album. “I think I decided that the record needs to be a double album. I made a bunch of stuff and I just want to make a bunch more stuff, ” she said. “There’s just more kind of sonic, conceptual ideas that I think need to get done to make everything make more sense. And we kind of have two album covers and it seems like a waste to throw one of them away.”
The experimental pop artist also discussed retiring from music, which she first hinted at in a Dec. 28 tweet that read, “I’m not quitting music, but def changing my main day job after BOOK 1.”
“One of the reasons why I keep saying I want to retire for music is I feel like music is … the iron grasp is getting really tight,” Grimes told Lowe. “Whereas I feel like in gaming or crypto or all these other things, there’s just this excessive freedom that sort of seems to be increasing. I don’t know. Because they’re newer ideas, there’s just less of a legacy of legal chokehold.”
According to a press release, “Shinigami Eyes” will appear on a new Grimes EP called Fairies Cum First, which is described as “a prelude” to the forthcoming album Book 1. Speaking with Lowe, Grimes also said that her next release will be a double album. “I made a bunch of stuff and I just want to make a bunch more stuff,” she explained. “There’s just more kind of sonic, conceptual ideas that I think need to get done to make everything make more sense. And we kind of have two album covers and it seems like a waste to throw on one of them away.”
Grimes released the new single “Player of Games” in December, with a music video directed by Anton Tammi arriving shortly thereafter. Her next record—the follow-up to 2020’s Miss Anthropocene—will be her first for Columbia Records.
In other Grimes news, she is partnering with Rocket League, the video game in which vehicles play soccer, for an in-game event called Neon Nights featuring “exciting Challenges, Golden Moons, a chaotic LTM, and unlockable Items featuring the immortal space princess GRIMES.” This seems to have something to do with Book 1, which Grimes has previously described as a space opera about lesbian AI. Rocket League‘s announcement continues, “In collaboration with GRIMES’ upcoming space opera, a super-intelligent deep space AI will begin transmitting Challenges directly into your life-sim, allowing you to unlock GRIMES-themed items. If our calculations are correct, they should arrive on Earth Wednesday, Jan. 26 at 9 a.m. PST (5 p.m. UTC)!”
Grimes added of the double LP, which currently has the title Book 1, “I think I decided that the record needs to be a double album. I made a bunch of stuff and I just want to make a bunch more stuff. There’s just more kind of sonic, conceptual ideas that I think need to get done to make everything make more sense. And we kind of have two album covers and it seems like a waste to throw on one of them away.”
Hey, that’s right now! Does this Rocket League business correlate with the “Shinigami Eyes” video somehow? I guess gamers are about to find out. Grimes will be on Rocket League‘s first ever Instagram Live with the Twitch streamer Athena today at 10AM PT, so check that out here and maybe all these promotional tie-ins will come into focus. In the meantime, the music video is ready to be stream/download below.
Elsewhere in the Lowe interview, Grimes discussed her plunge into NFTs and crypto, her stint on the singing competition Alter Ego and reiterated why she might retire eventually from making music. “The iron grasp is getting really tight,” Grimes said. “Whereas I feel like in gaming or crypto or all these other things, there’s just this excessive freedom that sort of seems to be increasing. I don’t know. Because they’re newer ideas, there’s just less of a legacy of legal chokehold.”
On March 5, 2021, Grimes signed with Columbia Records.[90] In June 2021, she appeared in Doja Cat’s music video “Need to Know”.
Later in June, she started a new partnered Discord server called “Grimes Metaverse Super Beta” and a new podcast “Homo Techno”, co-hosted with science communicator Liv Boeree. She used the Discord server to tease new music frequently, and released a snippet of a song called “Shinigami Eyes” which she continued to promote in subsequent social media posts as well as an upcoming collaboration with British DJ Chris Lake.
Grimes spoke about an upcoming concept album with Billboard, describing it as a “space opera”. In July 2021 Grimes, alongside will.i.am, Alanis Morissette, Nick Lachey, and Rocsi Diaz were revealed as judges on Alter Ego, a new singing competition series in which the contestants make the use of motion capture technology to portray themselves as “dream avatars”.
On September 30, 2021, Grimes released a new song titled “Love”. The song was recorded in response to her split from Elon Musk and the increased media attention from it. On December 3, 2021, Grimes released a new song titled “Player of Games”. On the same day, she also announced the title of her sixth studio album, Book 1.
