St Vincent: Masseduction review – accessible but challenging pop

In 1978, the porn mag Hustler ran one of the most infamous magazine covers in history – a woman’s legs sticking out of a meat-grinder. It played on the idea that the publication treated women like sides of beef (something a Larry Flynt cover line disingenuously protested against).

Annie Clark doesn’t actually reproduce this specific image in any of the high-concept artwork for her fifth album. But in the recent video for Los Ageless – a tremendous song about a city of surface and surgery, boasting one of the choruses of the year – she presides over a meat grinder chewing up the word “NO” and some legs stick out of a TV; there are ample references to the objectification of female bodies in visual culture.

One of the many, many themes of Masseduction is being female and being gazed upon – a natural enough consequence of Clark’s high-profile former relationship with a supermodel, Cara Delevingne, and her paparazzi. Power dynamics also feature heavily on Masseduction. London interviews for this compelling break-up record sometimes took place in a tiny room with Clark playing back pre-prepared answers to idiotic questions (“What’s it like to be a woman in the music industry?”). The album cover practically invites you to kiss her ass (it is, technically, the ass of one of Clark’s friends).

Ironically enough, for a musician who has often written abstractedly and in character throughout the course of her five albums, Masseduction could well be Clark’s most direct record yet. It is full of giddy highs (the guitar on Los Ageless! The quivering, bombastic Fear the Future!) and deep-sea trenches as Clark grapples with the loss of love, and who is pulling the strings. “The void is back and unblinking”, croons St Vincent on the album’s first song, the sinuous, electronic Hang On Me.

Clark’s versatile music perks up for Pills, but the message on the Beatle-y denouement is bleak: “Everyone you love will all go away”. Who could be the subject of the throbbing, kaleidoscopic Young Lover, a song in which Clark finds someone unconscious in the bath? “Wake up, young lover/ I thought you were dying”, Clark seethes; an ecstatic, miserable wail follows. The superficially blithe Happy Birthday, Johnny reconnects with a recurring character in St Vincent albums. Clark has always refused to reveal who “Johnny” is, while fans and writers sometimes have trouble with the idea that he may be a composite or a fiction. Johnny is living on the streets, and accuses Clark of forsaking him (“Of course, I blame me”). Smoking Section finds St Vincent contemplating throwing herself off a roof.

There is ample time for fun, too, on a record that refuses to settle for music-by-numbers: piano ballads about being sad, happy upbeat pop songs about lust. Savior is a frisky, minimal funk track redolent of Prince that finds St Vincent raiding the cosplay box. It’s clearly about sex, but it’s also about the roles we play for one another.

All of this anguish and mischief is parcelled up as art-savvy, saturated Technicolor. Accessible but challenging, Masseduction thumbs its nose at genre while Clark’s choice of producer – Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde) – roots it firmly in pop; it is, after all, an attempt to jump Clark from cult act to mass seductress. It’s working.