Are you prepared for Annie Clark’s upcoming era? The “urgent and psychotic” new St. Vincent album is described in a recent Mojo piece.
She recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio in Chicago, Electric Lady in New York, and her own Compound Fracture studio in Los Angeles. Welsh art-pop sensation Cate Le Bon, along with new Foo Fighters drummer Josh Freese and Dave Grohl, are all included on the album. In the narrative, Clark states, “I needed to go deeper in finding my own sonic vocabulary.” “I like to think of [the record] as post-plague pop; it’s heavily symbolic of heaven and hell. It makes sense given that spending that much time alone in a studio is, in my opinion, akin to torture.
“Written from the point of view of a deep narcissistic injury, of being slighted… just walking down the street and feeling like an absolute powder keg, like if somebody looks at you the wrong way you could explode,” according to Clark, is the subject of one song. She concurs that the mindset may be influenced by COVID lockdowns: “That kind of isolation breeds paranoia and loneliness, and loneliness can breed violence.” Both personally and socially, there has been a period of loss. However, death and loss serve as extremely illuminating experiences, dispelling everything that is unimportant.
According to reports, the album has “lots of guitars” and analog synths from the 1970s and 1980s. It sounds urgent and insane, in equal measure the most caustic sound and, I believe, the most acoustically blossoming, according to Clark. It is touted as a change from the tone of the contentious Daddy’s Home from 2021. According to Clark, “I approached difficult subjects with a lot of biting humor and wit in the last record.” “I had so much fun prancing around with a wig on.” This record is closer to the bone, harsher, and darker. It’s perhaps my least humorous record to date! It’s not at all adorable.
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