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Grimes has discussed the lyrical meaning of her new song ‘Delete Forever’, revealing that it concerns the deaths of some of her friends from opiate abuse.
“I’ve had six friends who’ve died from opiate-related deaths,” Claire Boucher told Genius as part of their Verified series. Watch the full interview below.
“I’ve never done heroin, but a lot of my friends were doing heroin, and I was just like ‘Woah, ok’. It’s flying too close to the sun.”
The singer says she thought the drug use “seems kind of dangerous, but it’s probably fine…but actually, [it’s] not fine.”
“The life of an artist [is] always chasing the heightened emotion, and people expect you to be living like that too,” she continues, “so there’s this expectation from yourself and from the outside that you need to be in a ‘fight or flight’ state all the time, and constantly accessing the darkest things that have ever happened to you.
“That’s one of the reasons we see so many artists dying, and shit like this going on, because people use drugs to chase the heightened state of emotion that they need to be a great performer or to be a great writer.”
She continued, referencing the track’s second verse, which reads: “Funny how they think us naive when we’re on the brink /Innocence was fleeting like a season / Cannot comprehend, lost so many men / Lately, all their ghosts turn into reasons and excuses“.
“My last few friends who died, I actually didn’t feel anything. It was weird, and I probably still haven’t processed the situation. The line “lost so many men,” I was almost thinking like in war… man down.
“My best group of friends got eradicated off the planet, and I have this weird post-war feeling, and I could not relate to anybody, because most people had not had a bunch of their friends die really violent, fucked up, scary deaths.”
Grimes recently revealed that she wrote the song on the night Lil Peep died. “Artists keep dying and stuff,” she said. “I just got super-super triggered by that.”
Grimes’ new album ‘Miss_Anthropocene’ comes out on Friday (February 21).
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