Meet Vancouver's hottest hometown girl: Grimes, aka Claire Boucher

From Rolling Stone to W Magazine, it's all about Grimes.

W talked about her "saucer-sized eyes and tendency to curse," and said the Montreal-based musician "looks and acts like a comic book nerd’s dream girl." Rolling Stone called her ballads "sumptuous" and recounted that she cooked up her music with GarageBand in her bedroom.

When Grimes (aka Claire Boucher) was a baby in Vancouver, she constantly hummed to herself, her mother, Sandy Garossino, told the Vancouver Observer. Born loving music, Grimes began creating it early, in her own way. “Everything starts with beats for her," Garossino said.

Two decades later, she's become an electro-pop high priestess, in the running for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize with her latest album, Visions.

Boucher has taken her recent experiences—including touring with Lykkie Li and playing SXSW—and spun them into gold.

On Visions, Boucher’s fascinatingly infantile vocals, layers of sighing, cooing and crying bounce off expertly timed beats and numinous synth effects. It’s a deceptively simple loveliness reflected onto an endless array of surfaces—like Marie Antoinette walking through the Hall of Mirrors.

And, it’s all so catchy too.

This mix of artfulness and accessibility is what has made international media, particularly in the UK, go gaga over Grimes. New single “Oblivion” was named the best song of 2012 so far by NME, and this year she has already appeared in Vogue, The Guardian, Dazed and Confused, and the abovementioned W and RS.

As usual, Canada is behind on our own promising underground artists. But, expect Canadian media to soon catch up when Grimes hits the Pacific Coliseum with Skrillex and Diplo on July 22.

So what should you know about Boucher that international media hasn’t already told you? Well, as they say, mom knows best.

A fairly regular Vancouver kid, with interests like anime, Harry Potter and Mariah Carey, it was during her adolescence that, as Garossino puts it, “something very strange happened.”

“She changed into some kind of super-brain, exploring the internet all the time.”