“It just sounds so tinny in here!” she exclaims, repeatedly raising and then completely lowering the volume on a guitar-studded power-punk anthem called “Flesh Without Blood.”

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Listen to just a couple songs from the new album, and you’ll hear flickers of that righteous indignation. It’s there in the staccato rocker “Flesh Without Blood,” which crests into a gloriously skybound climax: If you don’t need me, just let me go.

“It wasn’t so much a scrapped album,” Boucher tells me. "It was just [songs] that didn’t make it onto this album. Basically, I was doing a bunch of stuff, and maybe a bit before ‘Go,’ I was like, ‘You know, my life is getting a lot better. I’m going to put all this stuff on a hard drive and start again. There were just hundreds of songs—on this album that I’m making now, there’s at least a hundred songs that won’t make it onto this. I think all musicians have songs that don’t make it onto records.”

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That’s another reason why Boucher scrapped the album that she made: beyond the fact that it didn’t feel like enough of a sonic departure from Visions, it was simply a little too gloomy. (Still, she says she’ll “probably put it out for free at some point.”)

the extra time gave her room to expand upon the electronic palette that Grimes had become known for and mine the ’90s rock and punk and nu-metal that soundtracked her adolescence.

Another song—a “diss track about male producers” that layers helium-filled vocals over dense, tumbling breakbeats—draws inspiration from the final scene of Alexander Pushkin’s lyric poem Eugene Onegin. “It’s about a guy who acts like he knows everything and then comes back crawling on his knees, which has happened to me so many times,” says Boucher. Still another—a ferocious-sounding club track with twanging subs and planned verses from three female MCs whose names she isn’t ready to reveal—will be about “being too scary to be objectified.”

“They’re not all diss tracks, but there’s a lot of diss tracks,” Boucher tells me. “I think all my other albums were, like, sad. And this time it’s more happy and angry. I live in my own house that I pay for. I bought all this equipment myself. I control my own life now. No one has any say over what I do or where I go or when I do it.”

This time around—perhaps because she doesn’t want to feel hemmed in by the Grimes persona—she’s says she’s also planning on rolling out some new imaginary alter egos: “Okay, there’s Grimes, but there’s other ones too now—and they’re like a girl group,” she says. “There’s Screechy Bat, who’s the metal one. There’s one that’s super vampish and sexy now—I don’t know her name yet, but she’s like the Ginger Spice.”

Then Boucher asks Aristophanes what it’s like being a girl rapper in Taipei, and the title of their collaborative nu-metal track, “SCREAM,” begins to make sense: “I think being female is sometimes so weird,” Aristophanes explains. “Sometimes at my gigs, the male MCs and producers will say, ‘That’s not rap; that’s not hip-hop.’ Maybe because they’re judging my skill. I can’t feel very comfortable hanging out with them, so I just stay in my home and spend more time on music.”