Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	8.0/10
Metacritic	88/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	A−
Billboard
The Daily Telegraph
The Independent
NME	4/5
Pitchfork	8.5/10
Rolling Stone
Spin	8/10
Vice	A

Art Angels is the fourth studio album by Canadian singer and songwriter Claire Boucher, professionally known as Grimes. It was digitally released on November 6, 2015 by 4AD, and in physical formats on December 11. Boucher began planning the record in 2013 as the follow-up to her third studio album Visions, however she scrapped most of the material from these sessions and began a new set of recordings in 2014. The track "Realiti", which came from the earlier recordings, was released as a demo in early 2015.

Art Angels has been described as being more accessible than Boucher's previous albums while retaining her experimental influences. The album features guest appearances by Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes and American singer Janelle Monáe. The album spawned two singles—"Flesh Without Blood" and "Kill V. Maim"—as well as music videos for several tracks. Art Angels sold 11,000 copies in its first week in the United States and became Boucher's highest-charting album so far. The album was released to widespread critical acclaim and was ranked by several publications as one of the best albums of 2015.

Boucher's constant touring in 2013 for her 2012 album, Visions, almost led to a physical collapse by the end of the year, bringing her to a point where she recalled "putting a hand up and grabbing a piece of [her] hair, and [she] could just pull [her] hair out". She also became tired of how the music industry ignored her technical abilities, who would focus on her being a "female musician" and having a "girly voice"; she responded to these generalisations with "yeah, but I'm a producer and I spend all day looking at fucking graphs and EQs and doing really technical work". When media outlets began running her Tumblr posts as headlines, she wrote a post on her blog about her misrepresentation in the media and the sexism she had faced in the music industry, declaring "i dont want my words to be taken out of context. i dont want to be infantilized because i refuse to be sexualized [...] im tired of the weird insistence that i need a band or i need to work with outside producers [sic]". Being in an "unstable" and "beyond exhausted" state, along with her frustration toward the media, caused her to consider ending the Grimes project and solely writing songs for other artists, or at least putting her life in the public eye on hold. Her experiences, however, eventually began to strengthen her conviction in her being a solo artist. In a 2015 feature by The Fader, Boucher stated that while working in music studios "there [were] all these engineers [that didn't let her] touch the equipment [...] and then a male producer would come in, and he'd be allowed to do it". These incidents, which she described as sexist, left her "disillusioned with the music industry" and made her "realize what [she] was doing is important".

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