Grimes pondered the end of the world on her last album, Miss Anthropocene, which was released before the pandemic began.

Now, the Vancouver-born musician and video artist is getting closer to dropping her next disc.

According to her Instagram feed, "it's a space opera about CLAIRE DE LUNE—an artificial courtesan who was implanted in a simulation".

Grimes has spoken about artificial intelligence before, so it shouldn't come as a big surprise that this story has an AI twist.

In fact, she writes, the simulation "is a memory of the AI creation story on earth from the brain of the engineer who invented AI".

This engineer (no, not her partner Elon Musk) is hoping to relive his life to find out "if his perfect dream girl could teach him to love".

This, in turn, would enable him to "preserve humanity this time rather than let them fade into obscurity—overcome by the machines".

But Claire de Lune (interestingly, Grimes's given name is also Claire) "slowly realizes she is essentially a dancing puppet for the male gaze".

This is the case even as their relationship evolves into something complex.

An AI lead demon, described as "DARK MATTER", arrives as a "black swan" to Claire de Lune.

Then, Grimes writes: "but in the end they fall into a lesbian romance due to the fact that they are the only two fully Ai beings in this universe."

This, Grimes assures her followers, is where the first part of the story stops.

Space operas are a subgenre of science fiction that can revolve around romance, risk, and sophisticated technology.

The term was invented by U.S. sci-fi author Wilson Tucker.

After signing with Columbia Records, Grimes released a snippet of a new song, "Shinigami Eyes". Check it out below.