Things started off strong for Grimes during her set at Coachella 2024. She entered the Sahara Stage on a futuristic walking vehicle, something that crawled like a spider as she sat in the backseat. But they quickly devolved for the electronic singer-songwriter, who faced major technical difficulties during the 50-minute show.
Just after the halfway mark, Grimes had to restart “Music 4 Machines” numerous times, explaining that the songs were playing at double the speed that she intended. “This is a difficult thing to explain but we’re having a major technical error,” she said, trying to think of a solution on the fly. “Don’t judge me for being bad a calculating things.”
Grimes said that she was trying to do the math in real time to remember the tempo of each song she had queued up but wasn’t able to compute in real-time. Instead, she decided to play several unreleased songs, including ones that she recorded in the past few days. She paused between each track, letting out angsty screams, stating that it wasn’t “actually my fault” that the set was falling apart. “I’m trying to think. I’m not good enough at math for this shit,” she said. In the end, she finally led into “Genesis,” but the set was cut short and she exited the stage.
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The Canadian musician has released five albums throughout her career, most recently in 2020 with “Miss Anthropocene.” Last year, she put out three new singles, including “Welcome to the Opera” with Anyma, “I Wanna Be Software” with Illangelo, and “Nothing Lasts Forever” with Sevdaliza.