Grimes releases 'Accelerando' from Psy Opera, an AI concept album she made without generative AI

Grimes released “ACCELERANDO” on October 9, 2026, the first single from Psy Opera, her first album since Miss Anthropocene in 2020. The album is about AI, and she says she made it without generative AI.

There’s one exception, and she flagged it herself. On a song called “DeepSeek”, some of the lyrics were written by DeepSeek, the Chinese AI model.

Grimes’ Psy Opera is a concept album about AI and human extinction

“ACCELERANDO” is a big, apocalyptic dance track Grimes produced with her frequent collaborator VADAKIN. The video credits list Grimes, VADAKIN, Skyler Stonestreet and Elley Duhé as writers, and Cho Giseok directed it. It’s out on Nazgul/Eternal Recurrence, as Stereogum reported.

The idea behind the album started with a line she kept hearing in AI circles: “We’re building gods.” She told sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor in Interview Magazine that it sells humans short.

“

Why do you automatically assume you're so much lesser? You're literally responsible for creating AI.

The trailer, Eve Is Online…, came out on October 7 and rewrites the opening of the Gospel of John around AI: “On the first day, God created the large language model.” There’s no release date or tracklist yet, per The Fader.

When fans pushed back on the trailer, Grimes replied on X that it was “Created by a 70 person team over many months!” and asked people not to mislabel the team.

Does Grimes use AI in her music?

Mostly no, by her own account. “I actually don’t use it in my music. People have really misunderstood me here,” she told Okorafor.

The one AI credit on Psy Opera is the song “DeepSeek”. “Some of the lyrics were written by DeepSeek,” she said in April. On the day “ACCELERANDO” came out, she repeated it to a fan on X: “Only in the song Deepseek, which contains opinions and lyrics from Deepseek.”

She drew a line on the visuals too. A music video for what she called “the first song” was planned with AI, and she pulled the AI dancers even though she said the video “looks way worse without it.” Her reason: dancing, like language and music, is “a fundamental human mode of expression.”

So why do so many people assume she uses AI? Because of 2023. That April she open-licensed her voice: anyone could turn their own vocal into her GrimesAI-1 voice on Elf.Tech and split master royalties 50/50 with her on the songs they released (my Grimes artist profile has the full setup). That’s other people using a clone of her voice, with her approval. Looking back, she told Okorafor, “We did it more as an economic experiment.”

She also called AI “magic” on stage at the TIME100 AI Impact Awards in February 2025. And her own records have carried AI in small, labelled doses: on “Artificial Angels” in October 2025, she said the only AI was the voice at the start and the end (my coverage of that single).

Last week Olivia Rodrigo said she’ll never use AI anywhere in her music, and Joe Bonamassa said he doesn’t mind artists using Suno for a lyric. Grimes lands somewhere else: an album about AI that she says people made, with one song where the AI writes some of the lines.