2012Released
4:11

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Oblivion. By Songfacts®.

Grimes is the alter-ego of Vancouver-born one-woman band Claire Boucher. The waif-like songstress originally moved to Montreal to attend McGill University, where she became involved with the underground electronic and industrial music scene and met her now-manager and engineer Sebastian Cowan. She began making music in 2010, with two albums on local label Arbutus, but it was when this song began circulating as a mp3 in October 2011 that critics began getting interested. The tune soon became a major highlight of Boucher's live sets and it was released as a single on January 31, 2012.

The creepy lyrics hint at nighttime violence. Boucher explained to Spin magazine that "the song's sort of about being - I was assaulted and I had a really hard time engaging in any types of relationship with men, because I was just so terrified of men for a while."

The music video was directed by Emily Kai Bock and shot in Montreal at the Olympic Stadium and at McGill University's Molson Stadium. It finds Grimes dancing and singing amongst spectators, shirtless frat boys, as well as in a men's locker room surrounded by cartoonish masculine athletes. "Art gives me an outlet where I can be aggressive in a world where I usually can't be," she told Pitchfork, "and part of it was asserting this abstract female power in these male-dominated arenas."

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Oblivion.
DKey
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
156BPM

Album

The album Oblivion is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Oblivion.
4AD
2012 Arbutus Records under exclusive license to 4AD Ltd
2012 Arbutus Records under exclusive license to 4AD Ltd

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5.8MArtists
73.6MSongs
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