As it's our primary raison d'être, we here at Exclaim! have been on the pulse of the Grimes pregnancy rumours since as early as the end of last year. We scratched our collective heads when Elon Musk seemingly confirmed the pregnancy by sharing an anime meme in January, and here's where the journey has led us: the artist born Claire Boucher has — maybe by accident — revealed that she and the tech billionaire have a second child together.
In a new interview for Vanity Fair's April cover story, the Karl Marx scholar and Marie Antoinette of pop stan culture invited journalist Devin Gordon into her home in Austin, TX, to discuss new music — including a forthcoming collaboration with the Weeknd, reportedly titled "Sci-Fi," because of course — and general infamy.
After sharing that her one-year-old son X Æ A-XII was with his father, Gordon was perplexed to hear what was unmistakably a baby's cry.
"I'm not at liberty to speak on these things," Boucher offered in explanation. "Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is just out there — I mean, I think E is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff; his situation is like that. But, yeah, I don't know."
When the mystery baby cried again and was audibly shushed, the post-human musician laughed: "She's a little colicky too," adding, "I don't know what I was thinking."
She and Musk apparently welcomed Exa Dark Sideræl Musk — nicknamed "Y" — via a surrogate in December 2021, following complications with the artist's last pregnancy. All of this comes in spite of the fact that the pair announced their break up in September.
While sharing the news may have been an unplanned admission on Boucher's part, it coming in the context of a member of the press profiling her is the best-case scenario for those of us curious to attempt to understand the headspace from which a Grimes baby name emerges.
Of Exa Dark Sideræl's origins, Gordon wrote:
Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second). Dark, meanwhile, is "the unknown. People fear it but truly it's the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe." [Grimes] texts me a voice memo with the pronunciation of Sideræl —"sigh-deer-ee-el" — which she calls "a more elven" spelling of sidereal, "the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time." It's also a nod to her favourite Lord of the Rings character, the powerful Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the ring."
Naturally, as with the couple's last child, reactions to the baby's outlandish name have sparked conversation on the Twitter soapbox. See some of those reactions below.
In a new interview for Vanity Fair's April cover story, the Karl Marx scholar and Marie Antoinette of pop stan culture invited journalist Devin Gordon into her home in Austin, TX, to discuss new music — including a forthcoming collaboration with the Weeknd, reportedly titled "Sci-Fi," because of course — and general infamy.
After sharing that her one-year-old son X Æ A-XII was with his father, Gordon was perplexed to hear what was unmistakably a baby's cry.
"I'm not at liberty to speak on these things," Boucher offered in explanation. "Whatever is going on with family stuff, I just feel like kids need to stay out of it, and X is just out there — I mean, I think E is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff; his situation is like that. But, yeah, I don't know."
When the mystery baby cried again and was audibly shushed, the post-human musician laughed: "She's a little colicky too," adding, "I don't know what I was thinking."
She and Musk apparently welcomed Exa Dark Sideræl Musk — nicknamed "Y" — via a surrogate in December 2021, following complications with the artist's last pregnancy. All of this comes in spite of the fact that the pair announced their break up in September.
While sharing the news may have been an unplanned admission on Boucher's part, it coming in the context of a member of the press profiling her is the best-case scenario for those of us curious to attempt to understand the headspace from which a Grimes baby name emerges.
Of Exa Dark Sideræl's origins, Gordon wrote:
Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second). Dark, meanwhile, is "the unknown. People fear it but truly it's the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe." [Grimes] texts me a voice memo with the pronunciation of Sideræl —"sigh-deer-ee-el" — which she calls "a more elven" spelling of sidereal, "the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time." It's also a nod to her favourite Lord of the Rings character, the powerful Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the ring."
Naturally, as with the couple's last child, reactions to the baby's outlandish name have sparked conversation on the Twitter soapbox. See some of those reactions below.
Musically speaking, Grimes most recently released the blippy club-thumper "Shinigami Eyes" — which will appear on a forthcoming EP "prelude" to the album loosely-titled Book 1, led by first single "Player of Games."