Grimes just returned with her fifth studio album, Miss Anthropocene—and her fourth single, “4ÆM,” reinterprets a 2015 track from a Bollywood blockbuster film into a futuristic jam befitting a dystopian game.
The self-produced single—which samples Shreya Ghoshal’s performance of “Deewani Mastani” from the Indian film Bajirao Mastani—is sung from the character Mastani’s perspective:
I’m out late at 4 AM
He says, “How’s the weather, baby? How you’ve been?”
You’re gonna get sick, you don’t know when
They never doubt it at 4 AM
In a June 2018 tweet, Grimes described the track as an “ethereal chav jam”:
She expanded upon this idea in her liner notes for the track on Apple Music:
I got really obsessed with this Bollywood movie called Bajirao Mastani—it’s about forbidden love. I was like, “Man, I feel like the sci-fi version of this movie would just be incredible.” So I was just sort of making fan art, and then I really wanted to get kind of crazy and futuristic-sounding. It’s actually the first song I made on the record—I was kind of blocked and not sure of the sonic direction, and then when I made this I was like, “Oh, wow, this doesn’t sound like anything—this will be a cool thing to pursue.” It gave me a bunch of ideas of how I could make things sound super future. That was how it started.
As Stereogum points out, it leaked nearly a year ago. The song will appear on the soundtrack for the game Cyberpunk 2077. The Canadian songwriter—who voices a pop star named Lizzy Wizzy in Cyberpunk 2077—also noted how her sound reflects the game’s open-world environment. “I think my music fits with Night City because both are scary and pretty at the same time,” she said in a teaser video.
Back in December, she brought “4ÆM” to the live stage at the Game Awards:
As Genius users @bliplox and @frizzled noted, Grimes’ performance paid homage to Mastani’s dance scene from the 2015 Bollywood film Bajirao Mastani.
Miss Anthropocene is her first LP since 2015’s Art Angels. The LP includes the previously released singles, “Delete Forever,” “Violence,” and “My Name is Dark (Art Mix).”
Read all the lyrics to “4ÆM” on Genius now.
