If this is shitposting/belongs in a different thread let me know and I'll remove it, but I find this interesting and want some input.

So, there are a few people on my twitter right now, who are relative insiders (Chris Ott is the primary one on my timeline) who are saying with certainty that Nicole Dollanganger (the first act signed to Grimes' new music co-op label) is Grimes herself releasing music that wouldn't fit under the Grimes name.

According to Ott and others, when Grimes started getting popular, she manufactured this alternate personality to be able to release other material without the weight of it being under the "Grimes" moniker.

This seems like a stretch to me, but I can't deny the voices are similar. Plus with the way the media consistently reports inaccurately on Grimes interviews, requiring her to tweet out corrections to Pitchfork and clarify constantly, I can understand why she might want to distance this work from her main image.

Grimes is someone who works very hard on her image, and is pretty open about that. I can also understand why this material if released as the follow up to Visions, would be met with a ton of controversy, and the actual merit of the music might get a bit lost. So although, I still feel like this is pretty conspiracy theory sounding, I can't help but wonder if maybe some of it is true. Is it possible that Nicole is just a person who sings music that Grimes wrote/produced herself?

My primary source on this is Chris Ott, who in my opinion, tends to be a hot-head who is very knowledgeable, but much more concerned with posturing himself above Pitchfork. It would make sense to me for him to tweet this, because it's quasi-believable and if others believe it, it will make it look like he was "smart enough to see through it" again making him look like the guy who was too smart for Pitchfork.

I want to hear /r/indieheads take. Fire away.

Edit: So looking over the evidence, I'm fairly certain that Nicole Dollanganger is a real person, although I think that much was evident, the real question was how much she isn't a proxy for releasing Grimes' material.

There's a lot of evidence of her existing before all this online, and having made music, etc. Her bandcamp and twitter go back years, she's been interviewed on Noisey too.

Thinking over it now, it all seems a bit ridiculous. It's a lot easier to believe that she just was discovered and signed by Grimes, than Grimes' team constructing an entire persona over the course of years just to release some different material. Seems like a lot of effort to create and keep secret when there are other options for releasing your music anonymously. I guess I just got caught up in the people who were talking about it saying like they knew with certainty as if they had inside info they weren't revealing.

Anyway, it looks like she's playing shows in Ajax, Ontario that's a 2+ hour drive from where I am, but maybe someone in TO or something could go check out her live show, take some pictures and put the whole thing to rest lol.