The “time of monsters,” according to philosopher Antonio Gramsci, comes when the old world is dying and the new one “struggles to be born.” His quote seemed to get a lot of play on social media in 2020, as we all watched endless death play out via smartphone screen. The old way of doing things was very clearly over, but the future felt impossible to conceptualize. But this quote also resurfaced in the fall of 2016 during a contentious U.S. election (maybe you remember which one). It seems reasonable that people may have reflected on this in 2008, or in 2001, or in any perennial crisis. In 2024, the new world still struggles to push into existence.
Point being, building something new is a long, protracted process. Annie Clark, the musician we know as St. Vincent, knows this, and her new album All Born Screaming dives straight into the amniotic fluid. Where her previous album Daddy’s Home often felt like a retreat into ‘70s psychedelia, All Born Screaming is a sprawling collage of the past half-century of rock and popular music. “So Many Planets,” from the album’s stellar second half, recalls Blondie’s reggae-curious “The Tide Is High” run through 90s SoCal rock, while second single “Flea” boasts Dave Grohl on the drums and the spirit of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer winding through synth layers just out of sight. Even the lead single, “Broken Man,” seems to mimic a beat from Rosalia’s “Motomami” before drawing in post-grunge guitars.
It’s Clark’s reverence for musical history that connects these sonic threads. Lyrically, All Born Screaming returns to images often: of peeking beneath the skin, of tumbling to the ground. Opener “Hell Is Near” is an explicit statement of purpose for the project: a title that promises grim death but repeats “begin again.” All Born Screaming is sequenced wonderfully, traversing the period between death and life almost narratively. “I’ve been mourning since the day I met you,” Clark intones before sparking her own big bang. She compares herself to a “Flea” piercing the skin before finding her object hollow: a “Big Time Nothing.”
The latter track has the most in common on the album with the musical palette of her 2014 self-titled album. “Violent Times” moves back in musical history, from the Talking Heads to Chicago, as our lovers remain in Hell, entwined and entombed like the calcified bodies of Pompeii. It’s the first of three consecutive tracks to reference a literal fall; the second, “Power’s Out” sounds like both a eulogy to society and a tale of a specific person jumping to their death on train tracks. “Sweetest Fruit”—a title that feels like it should include the parenthetical “(Is On The Limb)”—specifically references pioneering musician SOPHIE, who, in a moment almost too mythical to be real, fell to her death while trying to climb for a better view of the moon.
The SOPHIE name-drop is sure to rankle some of the late musician’s devotees. Clark admitted in March that the two never met and she did not want to capitalize on someone’s death, but that she found the circumstances of her death to be impossibly poetic. Truthfully, “Sweetest Fruit” stands out on an already impressive album, and provides the strongest turn toward the catharsis and ascendence we crave after the violent times.
We aren’t out of the woods yet. The arrival of the new world is not vacation or utopia. It’s the beginning of this cycle yet again. But it does herald a new chapter for St. Vincent, whose output has been wildly varied sonically over the past decade (at least). And it does feel like a synthesis of these ideas that have come before, keeping some of the best details of Daddy’s Home but moving forward without what was holding it back. The backing vocals of 2021’s “Pay Your Way In Pain” are still here, in conversation. What they’re talking about is just more interesting.