All Born Screaming

What ties it all together is her beautifully honed skill as a songwriter. For all the sonic uproar, the melodies are impossible to miss, and so is the personality she imprints across the album: troubled but self-aware, wryly funny, the doubts and fears and worries she expresses completely at odds with the confidence of her approach to risk-taking, shape-shifting music.

“All Born Screaming” is focused and of a piece and all over the place at the same time. It’s a tribute to St. Vincent’s vision and skill that an album bursting with so many ideas is such a coherent whole.

Another radical musical/ psychological metamorphosis. [Jun 2024, p.39]

Clark has more than earned the freedom she gives herself to express so many different sides to her music, and it's a thrill to hear her stretch out on these ferocious, heartbroken, and ultimately life-affirming songs.

This latest set sees Clark back in domineering form. There’s not a second wasted on the album’s taut track list, the songwriter managing to balance her teenage inspirations simultaneously, go back to basics, and break new ground all at once.

The album finds Clark at her most fragile and ferocious, seeking beauty among the waste and wreckage of 21st-century life. Itself a beautifully ugly thing, All Born Screaming is a visceral examination of art and nature when both are pushed to the brink.

Yes, it is very hard to convey the sheer creative joy within these compositions Clark has come up with, but what’s more important is the bigger picture. And that is that St. Vincent can no longer be directly compared (or plagiarised).

Clark has said she had to take over production because she couldn’t figure out how to articulate the sounds in her head to somebody else. Listening to the finished product, it’s easy to see what she means. The surreal, slippery “Hell Is Near” is unlike anything Clark has done before—and particularly difficult to fully capture with words. Broadly psychedelic, a collage of 12-string guitar, piano and hydra-synth creates a song that feels like its own pocket dimension.

From the noisy low end of lead track Broken Man, through Flea’s prowling industrial pop and the superlative goth jazz, Bond-like theme of Violent Times, it’s a loud and unapologetically varied work.

It’s testament to Clark’s self-assured and enigmatic oeuvre: indeed, she still holds surprises for us yet.

It’s music that evokes the terror we all share in just being alive, and the way that fighting through it is a form of constant rebirth we all share, too. That’s the kind of truth this album excavates and celebrates many times, and why this is some of Annie Clark’s most satisfyingly urgent music yet.

Whether the stylistic digressions work for you or not is immaterial really, because they’re impressive no matter what your expectations were.

The result is a record that is by turns lush and ethereal, a sonically cohesive venture into slightly unfamiliar territory.

This is the sound of releasing a lifetime’s worth of strife and unease. That sounds, it turns out, is pretty damn excellent.

In ditching the artifice, Annie Clark has made her most generous and open statement yet.

A clearly cathartic album that further proves Annie Clark to be a brilliant and multifaceted musical force. [Jun 2024, p.83]

Musically, it feels like the first St. Vincent album since Marry Me presented without a unifying aesthetic: at various points, Clark incorporates Bond theme melodrama, Steely Dan-style prog, bouncy art pop and lechy industrial rock, making for what is arguably her loosest record, an exhale after years of fitting her songs into increasingly tight restraints. It’s a freedom that carries through to the album’s emotional content.