Grimes has released a new collaboration with Japanese Vocaloid producer Satappan-P (さたぱんP), built around the virtual singer Hatsune Miku (初音ミク). The track, “Miku-Maxxing,” appears on the EP BEYOND BORDERs ‘EMERGE M♡DE MIKU,’ a project pairing overseas producers with Japanese Vocaloid creators. In a new interview with Real Sound Tech, Grimes walked through how the genre-bending song – one that moves from psychedelic synths to a heavy guitar solo and a choir – came together.
Grimes said the track grew out of a jam session with longtime collaborators Grant Boutin and Eli, whose original beat was inspired, unexpectedly, by the anime “I’m reincarnated as a vending machine,” which Boutin was watching while playing a Nintendo game. Grimes said she initially thought the beat was “too crazy” to ever release. That changed when the EP’s production team asked for an especially fast, multi-part track, and Grimes realized the shelved beat fit perfectly.
Satappan-P joined the session and, according to Grimes, immediately recorded two to three hours of guitar solos. She said she resisted his heaviest guitar part at first, worried it was “too much,” but it ended up becoming her favorite part of the finished song. Grimes also said Satappan-P told her the track’s English-sounding vocal lines aren’t real Japanese, but “made up words.”
Grimes described 2026 as a personal “anti-guitar” year, saying she had been leaning into relaxed, low-key music – even basic pop like Taylor Swift – partly as a reaction against harder American alternative styles such as hyperpop. She credited Satappan-P’s guitar work on “Miku-Maxxing” with changing her mind, and praised Japanese music culture for embracing experimental, genre-mixing songs that she believes would be dismissed as “failures” in the U.S.
The interview also touched on Grimes’ broader relationship with Japanese culture, which she said has deepened since becoming a mother. She pointed to Studio Ghibli films as an example of children’s media she considers “high art,” contrasting it with what she described as often “dumbed down” children’s content in the U.S. She called Hatsune Miku one of the first digital artists people could form a genuine emotional connection with, citing Miku’s past collaboration with the late producer SOPHIE on Namie Amuro’s “B Who I Want 2 B feat. HATSUNE MIKU.”
Who are Hatsune Miku and Satappan-P?
Hatsune Miku is a Vocaloid – a singing voice synthesizer software – released by Crypton Future Media in 2007 and represented by an animated teal-haired character. Rather than a single “artist,” Miku is a platform: thousands of independent producers write, perform, and release songs using her voice, and she has gone on to headline sold-out concerts as an animated hologram. Satappan-P is one of those Japanese Vocaloid producers, known within the scene for guitar-heavy, high-energy production. His contribution to “Miku-Maxxing” is one of several collaborations between Japanese Vocaloid producers and international artists featured on the BEYOND BORDERs EP series.
Author’s Comment
I love that it took a Canadian pop star, a guy binge-watching a vending-machine reincarnation anime, and a Japanese guitarist who just started shredding for three hours straight to make this track happen – that’s basically how half of J-culture’s best crossovers are born, by accident, at 2 a.m. What gets me is Grimes calling herself ‘anti-guitar’ this year and then getting converted by a producer whose stage name literally has ‘P’ stapled onto it, the most unglamorous title in Japanese music. It says a lot about how seriously the Vocaloid scene is taken overseas now – these are the same producers Western fans used to write off as a niche internet hobby, and here’s Grimes handing them the mic and meaning it. Miku doesn’t age, doesn’t do press tours, doesn’t need PR damage control, and yet she keeps out-collaborating half the human pop stars out there. Honestly, at this rate she’s got a better international resume than most idols twice her nonexistent age.
