There's no room for subtlety on St. Vincent's seventh and most recent album, All Born Screaming.
It’s extreme. It’s life and death, the knife’s edge, “black and white and all the colours in a fire”. It’s a lot to wrangle, but if anyone’s up for the task, it’s Annie Clark, also known as three-time Grammy Award winner and rock ‘n’ roll darling St. Vincent.
Released in April, All Born Screaming has been lauded for its urgency and its cutting, visceral songwriting. Born from the pandemic – a time of both collective and personal grief for Clark – the album spans heaven and hell, charting parasitic obsession, self-abasement, violence and vitriol, as well as the fragility and subsequent beauty of life.
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“I was dealing with loss. We all were, right? I don’t mean it in an abstract sense,” she says. ” [I was] trying to grapple with the human condition, which is that life is brutal, and it’s beautiful, and it’s all of those things all the same time. But we get to live it and it’s very short, so we ought to dig in and live it as righteously as we possibly can.”
From the angelic, crystalline drawls of Reckless to the apathetic swagger of Big Time Nothing, Clark’s voice is a weapon brandished with precision. In the studio, she was joined by a small but mighty team including her longtime recording engineer Cian Riordan, the inimitable Dave Grohl and Welsh songstress Cate Le Bon.
The resulting instrumentation is at once alien and familiar, pairing textural synths with the acerbic force of Nine Inch Nails and the sparse, haunting grooves of Portishead.
“To me, nothing’s ever a direct reference to anything exactly,” she says. “You’re not going, ‘Oh well, what if I put the Fleetwood Mac snare sound?’ Whatever, ‘the acid baseline’ – it’s not that. You’re referencing your impression of your last memory of a thing. You’re referencing more an emotional reaction than something literal.”
The album’s artwork, an image of Clark on fire, came about in the same way. She and modern artist Alex da Corte had admired Fransico Goya’s Black Paintings on a trip to Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado, which eventually helped shape the visual language of the project. “Really, Alex is so brilliant and he made an image that feels very alive and also very iconic in a small black square,” Clark tells me.
In the past, she’s said she’s wanted the live shows to feel like a “pummelling”. Now, after taking the album to stages across the United States and on the precipice of her first Australian tour since 2018, it’s become much more than that.
“It’s like a pummeling and then a soothing, and then an ecstatic rave,” she says. “I’m finding this very strange phenomenon, which I promise doesn’t always happen, where people are more excited to hear the new material than the old material… in a way that I’ve been so pleased, and also a little confounded by.”
While Clark has always been regarded as a potent live performer, the All Born Screaming era sees her kick it up a notch, drawing from basement punk shows and her pre-stardom past as a member of the noise band Skull Fuckers. During each performance, she enters a “fugue state”, partially because the stakes are so high in front of a live crowd.
“I’ll crowd surf and spit and roll around on the ground and get totally physical with it,” she says. “Performing, for me, gets to be as feral or disturbed or vulnerable and serene as I am not when I’m just like, walking down the street or answering emails or whatever. It’s a very different thing, that kind of alchemy that happens between live performer and audience.”
Each night, as Clark brings All Born Screaming to hungry fans each night, kicking and flailing in kitten heels and tailored blazers, she’s more in the moment than at any other time in her life. It’s only months after the release, but there’s always more to be done. After an album as ambitious and climactic as All Born Screaming, where does one go?
“With every record I ever make, I’m so proud of it and I’ve worked so hard on it – otherwise I wouldn’t put it out. But then life moves on and nothing can stay the same. You change with new information and new experiences. So I always think my next record will be my best record. You have to believe that the next thing must be better, because otherwise, why do this? Like, go do something else.”
Tickets are on sale now to see St.Vincent on her Australian tour. Grab them here.
