Grimes is finally ready to release a full length album again, and she is setting one boundary before anyone presses play. Her first record in six years, titled Psy Opera, is not about her ex, Elon Musk. The personal material is being held back for a second installment.
The alternative pop singer and songwriter announced the project, then dropped by Swiftologist’s Proto Pop podcast on Sunday (Oct. 11), where she described Psy Opera as a fully conceptual work shaped by her thinking on artificial intelligence.
That concept comes with a structure attached. Grimes said the album will arrive in two parts, and that the second half will offer far more insight into her private life.
“The second album is 100% personal,” she said. “But I really didn’t want any of this [first album] to be about Elon. Not at all.”
The autobiographical songs, she explained, “just couldn’t come first,” because she felt it mattered more to lead with the technology themes that open the Psy Opera era.
Even so, she carries one misgiving about how the two halves came together. Her “only regret about this album,” she told the podcast, is that she did not weave the personal and the conceptual material more evenly across both discs.
“I sort of wish I had a bit more of the emotions on this side and a bit more computer on the other side,” she said. “Overall, though, it’s about being even more traumatized by the late-stage empire than I am about other things.”
A Trailer Built on Biblical Language
Psy Opera has been taking shape in public for some time. Grimes previously discussed it during an April conversation with Interview, and a few days before the podcast she posted a video trailer that mixed futuristic visuals with scriptural phrasing.
“In the beginning was the word,” a voice-over states. “And the word was God … Artificial light rivaled the sun, and God said: ‘Conquer the heavens.'”
On Proto Pop, Grimes also addressed how she used the very technology sitting at the center of the album. Only one track on Psy Opera involved generative AI, she said, and her intention was to explore the tool’s complexities rather than to endorse it.
“I wanted to bring everyone through my journey of getting so dark and nihilistic … I was going through the trial in my personal life, and I was also kind of going through a trial in public,” she said. “For literal years, I just woke up in abject terror every morning. It was like, ‘I’m guilty of some new thing outside and inside at every point in my life every day for years.'”
Psy Opera arrives more than half a decade after Miss Anthropocene, her previous album, which debuted at No. 32 on the Billboard 200. It is also her first LP since splitting from Musk, with whom she shares three children.
That separation has not been simple. At various points over the past few years, Grimes has publicly raised custody issues and objected to her former partner bringing their oldest child to meet President Donald Trump in February 2025. Musk is the world’s wealthiest man and one of the most powerful figures in both technology and politics.
Speaking on the podcast, Grimes said she has taken a recent interest in historical women whose reputations became tangled up with powerful men, and she counts herself among them.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Are you so sad that you are now so defined by a man?'” she said. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know, I feel like I’m one of the first women in history who can transmute this into art in a way.’ I welcome the situation.”
Listeners who want the full picture can watch Grimes’ complete interview with Swiftologist, along with the video introduction she released for Psy Opera, ahead of the two part era she is now preparing to launch.
