St Vincent – All Born Screaming

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Label: Total Pleasure Records
Released: 26th April 2024

There has always been an underlying darkness to the guitar-wielding eccentricity of St Vincent, but ‘All Born Screaming’ is an outright and glorious horror show. Like the meeting of minds between Bowie and Nine Inch Nails of the 90s, but through the singular genius of Annie Clark, this album pits art-pop sheen against industrial noise in the Hadron Collider and revels in the black hole it creates. 

Self-produced and with a slew of guests, including Cate Le Bon and both Dave Grohl and John Freese (Foo) fighting over who plays drums throughout the album, it seems universally recognised that Annie Clark is not only a visionary but a true master of her craft.

From the first tentative notes of ‘Hell Is Near’, she makes it clear there are no blonde wigs or Talking Heads to hide behind on this album as she sings of beginning again and baring all. Raw and immediate, there is no looking back. “What are you looking at?” she snarls on the feisty ‘Broken Man’. ‘Big Time Nothing’ brings big-time sass with a Prince-like groove that she carries off with heaps of style. Helping to anchor the album’s core, she pivots into the brooding blockbuster drama of ‘Violent Times’ that feels like a lost Sean Connery-era Bond theme.

The second half of the album waltzes deliriously through a dystopian fiction of suicides at subway stations and staring into space before ‘All Born Screaming’ delivers a healthy dose of self-evaluation and existentialism. “I was a pantomime of a modern girl / those were the days / and I was miserable,” she reveals before the song dissolves away to chants of the song’s title.

There is enough here to deduce that this album is something of a re-birth of where Annie Clark ends and St Vincent begins. The finished result is an album that confidently states Annie Clark as one of the greatest songwriters around while, in her renewed zest for her own authenticity, the scope of what already seemed to be boundless talent feels like it has even more potential; the sky is no longer the limit.

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