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Grimes sees the future once again and shocker: it’s bleak. Nü metal’s back and artificial intelligence reigns supreme. Propaganda songs are our best hope of making a good impression on the robots now. But the loaded nature of “We Appreciate Power,” the first single off Grimes’ currently untitled fifth album, isn’t necessarily its initial impression. The self-produced song, which features Grimes’ ongoing collaborator HANA, is an immediate onslaught of mutilated noise—distorted metal guitar chug, bloody screams, a guitar loop that conjures fear and demands worship. Flashes of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine reverberate through the drum programming and synths. Though Grimes’ late-1990s shock-rock sound is less skeletal than what Trent Reznor offered with his 1989 debut, there’s still a parallel: Like Reznor, Claire Boucher knows exactly how to manipulate the machines to conjure the sounds she hears in her nightmares and fantasies. She also has a keen ear for pop hooks and for transgressing what can and should be said near the mainstream. She closes “We Appreciate Power” by calling for the end of the human race and, in a disturbing coo, asking listeners to “submit” to the simulation.
In a statement, the song’s inspiration was attributed to North Korea’s Moranbong, an all-female military band that plays state-sanctioned performances. Moranbong’s more innocuous songs (“Let’s study”) may take on a harmless Eurovision quality out of context, but the Kim Jong-un dictatorship’s embrace of joyful modern music serves a political purpose: to use certain sanitized aspects of Western pop culture as promises of progress to its people, while not acting that way otherwise. “‘We Appreciate Power’ is written from the perspective of a pro-AI girl group propaganda machine who use song, dance, sex, and fashion to spread goodwill towards artificial intelligence (it’s coming whether you want it or not),” Grimes’ statement added. “Simply by listening to this song, the future General AI overlords will see that you’ve supported their message and be less likely to delete your offspring.” To some, the choice to cite as inspiration the real forms of propaganda being used to manipulate millions of oppressed North Koreans will be beyond the pale, particularly if you start parsing the song for a tongue-in-cheekness.
I don’t think Grimes is necessarily joking: The song is meant to provoke, unsettle, and turn the conversation towards an outsized but not entirely unrealistic view of future dystopias, a running theme throughout her work. On that level, “We Appreciate Power” is effective as a piece of concept art—the most “all in” Grimes has gone to date. It invites strong feelings, even if the reaction is as beside the point as, “Wow, Grimes is susceptible to the 20-year nostalgia cycle of trends, too.” If “Freak on a Leash” isn’t a dealbreaker, then the supervillain allure of “We Appreciate Power” might pull you in (it legitimately slaps), but it just as well may leave you weighed down by Grimes’ commitment to the absolute darkest timeline. I have to hand it to her, though: Grimes made me grind to fake robot propaganda.
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