Grimes has joined Iranian Dutch artist and producer Sevdaliza for a new single, “Nothing Last Forever.” The one-off single is Sevdaliza’s second release of 2023, following “Ride or Die,” featuring Villano Antillano, which arrived in June. Grimes, meanwhile, debuted “Welcome to the Opera” with Anyma earlier this year.
The song sees the pair sharing vocals of a gritty electronic backdrop, with lyrics like “We are machines made for dreaming.” The artists teased the track earlier this week with the statue-themed cover art.
Grimes’ last album, Miss Anthropocene, arrived in 2020. Earlier this year, she announced that anyone can use AI models of her voice “without penalty,” and that she’d split royalties 50/50 with the creator of any successful song doing so. “Feel free to use my voice without penalty,” she wrote. “I have no label and no legal bindings.”
Recently, the musician joined Aespa for a discussion for Rolling Stone‘s Musicians On Musicians issue. While the partnership might initially seem unusual, Grimes’ love of K-pop goes back more than a decade and she’s extremely interested in new technologies, as are the members of Aespa. “I feel like there’s so many random things we’ve both done that no one else has done,” Grimes told the group in the interview. “Like the avatars.”
She added, “I’m interested in the interplay between technology and music. [You’re] in this pop-idol context, but there is all this high-concept subtext. I like the euphoric gratification of pop visuals and pop music, but I also like throwing in weird things like how you guys deal with metaverse and identity.”
Grimes has also been in the spotlight lately thanks to her ex Elon Musk. In October, she took legal action against the tech billionaire over their children. The former couple share three children, X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl, and Tau Techno Mechanicus. Over the course of their relationship, they have largely tried to keep news about their children secret: Exa Dark (also known as “Y”) was born via surrogate a year before she was announced, and Techno Mechanicus, was only just revealed in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk.