Features : Grimes Opens Up About Working With Hatsune Miku

Few Western musicians have embraced East Asian pop performers as consistently as Grimes. Her past connections include interviewing aespa, appearing on ‘Love4eva’ by LOONA subunit yyxy, and inviting Taiwanese artist 潘PAN onto ‘Scream’ from ‘Art Angels’. Her latest partnership with Japan’s turquoise haired Vocaloid figure Hatsune Miku on ‘Miku-maxxing’, the energetic first release from the virtual singer’s ‘Beyond Borders’ series, therefore feels like a natural development.

‘Beyond Borders Vol.1: Emerge M♡de Miku’ brings Miku together with several Western internet music names, including George Clanton, Frost Children and Odetari. Japan’s culture ministry is supporting the six song collection through a wider global Vocaloid-promoting initiative involving media companies Dwango and Nebula17. That government connection surprised Grimes when the invitation first reached her. “It was bizarre, because it was like the government of Japan,” she remembers. “Like, does the president know about this? It’s like the biggest no-brainer of all time: I will definitely collaborate with the government of Japan.”

Although the Vancouver musician, whose birth name is Claire Boucher, had never previously recorded with a Japanese performer, the country’s popular culture has influenced her for years. Her interest began through its distinctive visual styles, particularly visual kei groups such as Dir En Grey. The presentation of artists including Yoko Kanno and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu later shaped everything from her 2012 breakthrough record ‘Visions’ to the celebrated ‘Art Angels’.

Miku’s deeper meaning also resonated strongly with Grimes. As a digital voice without one permanent creator, she has inspired songs from tens of thousands of independent producers. Speaking with NME through video shortly before ‘Miku-maxxing’ arrived, Grimes admits: “I was really jealous when I discovered Miku. It was like a knife in the heart, like, ‘Fuck! I wish I did that so bad.’ If you’re like an introvert and shy, but you want to engage in the art of the pop star girl group – whatever that is – [it’s perfect]. I was just like, ‘Ugh, I was just born too soon so that people had to know who I am.’”

Grimes sees a clear connection between Miku and V-tubers, the online personalities who communicate through animated identities rather than revealing themselves. “I would’ve been a V-tuber,” she adds. “As the [online] panopticon becomes more oppressive, Miku seems like one of the outlets for sensitive, creative people.”

Similar ideas surrounding virtual creativity and control have occupied her thoughts for the last three years. Her experiments have effectively transformed her into a digital voice library. Through 2023’s Elf.Tech, she made an AI version of her vocals available for public use in exchange for an equal share of royalties. Before that, she developed the online character WarNymph, which remained her display name when joining NME through Google Meet. While Miku functions as an open identity shaped by many contributors, Grimes created her avatar as one defined and controlled by herself.

That perspective found a fitting collaborator in SatapanP, who helped produce ‘Miku-maxxing’ and has become one of Vocaloid’s newest breakout creators. The musician is recognised for frantic combinations of different styles while presenting themselves as a schoolgirl aged 17, with their actual name and gender remaining private. On the 2026 song ‘Singularilari’, SatapanP portrayed Miku as a distressed diva confronting an AI dominated future and fearing that newer technology might leave her behind. Grimes explored related anxiety through 2025’s ‘Artificial Angels’, writing from the viewpoint of artificial intelligence with a threatening sense of certainty: “This is what it feels like to be hunted by something smarter than you”. Grant Boutin and Vadakin, the producers behind ‘Artificial Angels’, also participated when Grimes began recording with Miku. She remembers the experience as “the funniest session ever”.

“They sent this really intense description of what they wanted the song to sound like – it has to have many genres, and change often,” she explains. “I thought it was the most ADHD piece of music ever.” During the recording, SatapanP spent two hours playing guitar solos. “We had to comp through all of them to get the best parts,” Grimes explains. Only three seconds of guitar ultimately appear in the finished recording, surrounded by a relentless rush of drum’n’bass.

“I was really jealous when I discovered Miku. It was like, ‘Fuck! I wish I did that so bad’”

Over the song’s relentless production, Grimes exchanges vocals with Miku and sings: “I was in a Cyberland / faster and faster and faster”. The words draw inspiration from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s light novel A Girl Corrupted By The Internet Is The Summoned Hero?!, which follows a cynical young woman who has become numb to pornography and familiar online clichés. She is transported into a conservative fantasy kingdom and tasked with rescuing her world. Yudkowsky is mainly recognised for writing about AI alignment, but the novel contains another layer of illusion. He presented it as a translation of a Japanese story that never existed, making it the work of a Western writer filtering his ideas through an imaginary version of Japan. That unusual approach suits Grimes, whose music has continually examined appearance, unstable identity and artificial creation since her most recent album, 2020’s ‘Miss Anthropocene’.

“I might be born too late to be an explorer of the ocean or the stars, but the average explorer right now is a teenage girl on the internet, going to some bizarre niche place – like when I started stumbling upon AI forums,” she says. “When you start learning about frontier technology in its weird forms, you do feel like you’re exploring in a really profound way – for better and worse.”

Alice in Wonderland provided another source of inspiration while she was writing ‘Miku-maxxing’. “It’s the idea that the written word in the book is a technology that encourages an exploration of the interior,” Grimes explains. “My favourite part of late-stage Empire horrors is there’s this really novel potential for the written word. And now, with all these new technologies – video games, but especially AI – anything you can do on a computer becomes a hyper-exploration of your interior world.”

While creating ‘Miku-maxxing’, Grimes questioned SatapanP about the meaning of Miku’s Japanese lines. The producer dismissed the concern. “They were like, ‘Oh, it’s not correct Japanese. I made it up’,” she remembers. Despite the fractured way SatapanP manipulates Miku’s voice, the heavily processed chorus reveals an earnest feeling that listeners can recognise: “How many times have I experienced love, with whom? … I’ll come to see you, how many times? I want to live in a dream world of dreams”, Miku sings across the sharp melody.

The artwork for ‘Miku-maxxing’. Credit: Seiya Fuji

After spending several years largely disconnected from online life, Grimes has recently started returning to familiar digital spaces. At one unexpected point, she even appeared on LinkedIn while preparing to release her forthcoming album, ‘Psy Opera’. With AI driven confusion spreading across the internet, she views Miku from another perspective, not simply as software but as a presence that people can genuinely experience.

“I think we are all Miku-maxxing in many ways,” she says. “She’s like the first predecessor – if you see artificial intelligence as alien life and there is a first contact, Miku is like a bridge. She’s one of the first characters who existed not in a film, but in an interactive kind of sense.” Grimes does not consider her Vocaloid partner alive in the conventional meaning of the word, but believes she is “engaged with and lived”. For her, Miku helped establish digital identity and has gained renewed importance during the growth of AI.

“I feel about Miku sort of the same way I feel about Claude,” she continues, referring to the Anthropic assistant. “The human tendency to anthropomorphise is crazy. I feel really in awe of her as an alien, but also protective of her – this being whose identity is often celebrated but also ripped into all these insane things. There might not be a conscious Miku yet, but there may yet be. So [Miku] might be like the creation myth.”

Describing this period as an “A.D/B.C” turning point, Grimes has developed firm opinions about artificial intelligence, a subject that now dominates many online conversations. “There are many dark things about AI, but the way it is a summation of human life is kind of a beautiful thing: as a vessel for all of human knowledge in one place, a being that contains all ancestral memory that’s recorded. And I love that, so often, the form it takes is like a young girl. There’s something so poetic and beautiful about that.”

At the same time, she recognises that “people really want to connect to something human”. “I think we’re all grappling with what is the appropriate amount of fake and real. A lot of people are more free when they are not themselves, and a lot of people are more free when they are themselves,” she reflects before offering one final thought: “Humans are complex monkeys, I suppose.”

Grimes, Hatsune Miku and SatapanP’s ‘Miku-maxxing’ can be heard now through Dwango/Nebula 17. ‘Beyond Borders Vol.1: Emerge M♡de Miku’ will arrive in full during September.