“Weird pop” is the new normal.

This weird pop feel is seen across the industry and Grimes helped pioneer it to the elation of some fans and the anger of others. Grimes, who put out her fourth studio album “Art Angels” last Friday, is now in a much different position with her music than she ever was with any of her earlier work.

The artist, known for an eccentric and unique style of self-made music, is being given the full pop treatment by the media with this release. From the coverage she’s been getting, a casual listener or reader could understandably surmise that Grimes is just another pop star with a huge album release cycle set to dominate radio plays and music writing alike.

This time, that assumption’s pretty on point.

For years, Grimes has been seen by many within and outside the mainstream press as the most bizarre name in today’s indie scene, with mumbled lyrics, high-pitched vocals and a style of modern electronic pop that few really had exposure to at the time.

This is a revelation that some music fans haven’t taken to lightly. Artists like Tame Impala and The Weeknd, who had a small but dedicated group of underground fans constructing their early fan bases, have released huge, booming pop albums this year — Tame Impala with “Currents” and The Weeknd with “Beauty Behind the Madness” — and have received acclaim from critics but backlash from fans.

It’s 2015, and weird electronic pop artists like Chvrches and Purity Ring (undoubtedly influenced by Grimes in their own ways) count as two of the fastest-growing names in music these days, leaving a larger market for Grimes’s music than ever before. With her 2012 release “Visions” being hailed by NME as among the greatest albums of all time and Pitchfork’s recognition of the album’s single “Oblivion” as the greatest song of the 2010s so far, Grimes had a bigger opening for coverage than any album of hers prior, with three years of buildup that included a saga with a scrapped recorded album.

The reactions to “Art Angels” have followed this trend — near-universal positive reviews for the album shine in contrast with fans complaining Grimes has gone too pop, too mainstream or too generic. Grimes, like the two aforementioned artists that broke out in 2015, is now primed for her biggest album release yet.

But that’s how it should be. The words “weird pop” have a “pop” in there too. This has been a weird year for music in that the traditional labels of “indie,” “indie pop” and “indie rock” seem less relevant than ever. Artists formerly under their banner have gone, well, “pop.”

Honestly, I don’t know what kind of long-term effects this is going to have on music as a whole. I’m not going to be the first or last to suggest that indie as we know it is less indie than ever. For this brand of music, though, I’m impartial to the phrase weird pop. It’s far more descriptive to answer the centuries-old “what kind of music do you like?” icebreaker question with, and labeling one’s tastes as weird off the bat is something that people with “alternative” tastes would gladly attach themselves with.

Grimes is past the idea of indie too; she said in a Sept. 28 New Yorker profile that hearing Mariah Carey when she was younger “shattered the fabric of my existence” as an artist.

Don’t take away from what she’s accomplishing, though: Grimes is a pop artist through and through, and that’s hardly the derogatory remark it may have been just a few years ago. Pop is cooler than ever once again, and Grimes’ role as a pioneer of the “weird pop” movement is sure to take her career — and those of other musicians waiting to break out — to new heights. So don’t be bitter about your favorite artists going in a more poppy direction if that’s how they’re staying or becoming more relevant.

To use an out-of-context lyric from “Art Angels”: “Welcome to reality.”

Brett Weiser-Schlesinger is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or by Twitter at @brettws.

Published on November 10, 2015 at 8:57 pm