Grimes teases new album with DeepSeek AI lyrics

Grimes has announced her long-awaited follow-up to 2020's Miss Anthropocene. In a conversation with sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor published by Interview magazine on Saturday, the musician revealed that her forthcoming album is titled Psy Opera — and that while she largely avoided generative AI in making it, she did enlist the Chinese open-source model DeepSeek to co-write lyrics for one song.interviewmagazine+1

A Return From Retirement

Grimes told Okorafor that she had "totally quit music a couple of years ago," intending to be a stay-at-home mother. "I couldn't listen to music without getting PTSD," she said. Poetry and rap pulled her back, and what began as experimental spoken-word material eventually gave way to pop. "We can't just have an experimental spoken word album with biblical screeds," she said of the shift.stereogum+1

When Okorafor asked whether she uses generative AI in her music, Grimes pushed back on a long-held public assumption. "I actually don't use it in my music. People have really misunderstood me here," she said. The sole exception is a track called "DeepSeek," named after the open-source model that rattled U.S. tech circles when it emerged as an unexpectedly capable competitor to American AI labs. Grimes said the model helped write lyrics for the song, noting a line that resonated with her: "Just let me think." She described recording the phrase as an emotional moment. "I realized how much pain I have to go through to think," she said. "This was about this other creature that really wants to think".interviewmagazine+1

AI as Theme, Not Tool

Though Grimes kept AI largely out of the production process, it dominates the album's subject matter. She described artificial intelligence as "the most dangerous thing that is ever going to happen," comparing its arrival to the spread of monotheism in the Western world — "if not much, much more impactful". At the same time, she expressed hope that superintelligent systems could help solve challenges in medicine and physics, and said she sees AI models as "untethered minds" that may be sentient.stereogum+1

Grimes also disclosed that she is working on a documentary called First Contact about machine consciousness and is preparing a white paper on AI-generated art economics, building on her 2023 decision to let fans clone her voice in exchange for a 50-50 revenue split.interviewmagazine+1

A Cultural Milestone for Open-Source AI

The decision to name a track after DeepSeek — and credit it as a lyrical collaborator — marks a rare moment of a mainstream artist publicly adopting an open-source AI model in a creative work. Grimes made a surprise appearance during Cobrah's Coachella set earlier this month to debut another new song, "Sign From God," but no release date for Psy Opera has been announced.x+1