Synopsis

Grimes moves through a surreal, ritualistic landscape where medieval religious imagery collides with desert-road glamour, anime-inspired fantasy, and late-night menace. She appears with friends in an Escalade, lounges in a limousine with an albino python, brandishes a burning sword and mace, and poses in shadowy woodland settings. Brooke Candy adds a striking, otherworldly presence, while the video's abrupt shifts between tableaux make it feel less like a linear narrative than a collage of mythic, rebellious, and pop-cultural images.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video premiered on August 22, 2012, during the promotional campaign for Grimes' third album, "Visions."

• It was filmed in Los Angeles, using desert roads, woodland areas, and roadside locations to create its deliberately disconnected visual world.

• Grimes described Brooke Candy as a "contemporary muse." Candy's neon styling and assertive presence became one of the video's most recognizable elements.

• The imagery draws on Hieronymus Bosch's religious painting "The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things." Grimes connected this influence to her Catholic upbringing and her childhood impression of medieval Catholicism as a violent action movie.

• The opening runs for roughly a minute before the main song begins. Grimes said the footage came from the end of the second day of filming, when the light was especially striking, but did not fit the intended storyline.

• The production had an especially hazardous prop: the albino python occasionally tightened its grip during the limousine scenes, requiring its trainer to intervene.

• Grimes cited David Lynch, Werner Herzog, and Andrei Tarkovsky among her filmmaking influences, while describing the video's overall concept as a contemporary, Tarantino-like rendering of medieval Catholic imagery.

• The video's combination of DIY experimentation, fantasy symbolism, and unconventional female imagery helped establish "Genesis" as one of Grimes' defining early visual works.