St. Vincent’s Last Album Was Really Good. Why Does Barely Anyone Talk About It?
Minus her Grammy win this year, ‘All Born Screaming’ kind of came and went. It deserved better.
WHY YOU KNOW HER: Did that one Twilight song with Bon Iver, dated Cara Delevigne, does fashion shows sometimes
WHAT’S THE VIBE? Abrasive, angular, alluringly distant
START HERE BUT ALSO KEEP READING: “Broken Man,” “Big Time Nothing,” “Reckless”
Lots of publications run retrospectives on albums when they turn 10 or 20. But what about a year after their release? That’s a great time to look back on whether you overhyped an album, how well it holds up, or if it really went overlooked. That’s what Lavender Sound does with our 1-Year Anniversary columns.
Sometime between the release of St. Vincent’s “Broken Man” and the album it belongs to, All Born Screaming, I had a friend over who’s a St. Vincent fan but hadn’t heard the track yet. “Holy shit” was his immediate reaction when the song ended, and it’s the correct response. The first time I heard “Broken Man,” I did what the very best St. Vincent tunes — as in, many of them — make me do and kept hitting replay. I knew that a monster of an album lay ahead, and All Born Screaming, released a year ago this Saturday, was exactly that to me upon its release. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at critics’ and publications’ 2024 year-end album and song lists or asking the average music fan for their corresponding lists.
The music on All Born Screaming, St. Vincent’s seventh album, is somewhat less shrouded in enigma than Clark’s often mysterious, places-you-at-a-distance work. Not always, though; “The Power’s Out” feels like a less withheld but still plenty ominous version of her 2011 masterpiece “Cheerleader” from her, well, 2011 masterpiece Strange Mercy. But more often than not, these songs lie at the nexus of Clark’s abrasive rock foundation and her habit of placing her listeners at arm’s length. It’s a great album by one of my favorite rock musicians, it’s a fundamentally St. Vincent album, and yet, people seem to forget it exists.
I’m surprised about this because, for the past decade or so, St. Vincent has been a critical darling, a musician who gets lots of streams for someone who isn’t making Top 40 music, and someone whose work you’ve heard in TV shows and the like. (Her absolute banger “Los Ageless” opening the fifth season of the absolute banger known as Bojack Horseman is one of my favorite music moments on TV ever.) My question is, Where did all the love go?
On one hand, it’s a baseless question. All Born Screaming won St. Vincent her third Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album, which she also won for 2014’s St. Vincent (deserved) and 2021’s Daddy’s Home (not deserved, her weakest album other than her oft-forgotten debut, 2007’s Marry Me). The LP’s Metacritic score is as good as ever for a St. Vincent album: 89, which is higher than Daddy’s Home (85) and 2017’s MASSEDUCTION (88), my favorite album of hers. All Born Screaming’s Metacritic score is also the same as St. Vincent’s and higher than 2011’s Strange Mercy (85), the album that vaulted Clark into the A-list tier of indie rock musicians and gave us “Surgeon,” which seems impossible to play on guitar yet you can find video after video of Clark doing exactly that. And over on YouTube Music (which I use instead of Spotify because it also includes ad-free YouTube) (nobody paid me to say that), all 10 All Born Screaming tracks have hundreds of thousands of plays, with “Broken Man” racking up 1.8 million plays. No small potatoes, and yet, the album is kind of gone with the wind.
It’s a shame, really: “Broken Man” is just one thing that’s excellent and very deeply Annie Clark about All Born Screaming. The track’s abrasive drum machines and tidal-wave-sized guitar blasts evoke Nine Inch Nails (yes, another Nine Inch Nails mention in Lavender Sound, are you really surprised) while taking Clark’s longtime obsessions with agony, tension, and distortion to their natural end. As her sneers of “Like you’ve never seen a broken man!” get more intense in conjunction with the roaring guitars, the demon that’s always felt like it’s underlying her morose songwriting is fully unleashed. “Big Time Nothing” could’ve slotted perfectly into St. Vincent or MASSEDUCTION yet feels like a bolder, gayer evolution from the latter album, which is already very bold and gay if only thanks to its fourth track, “Sugarboy” and the fast version of “Slow Disco.” “Big Time Nothing” is as much about the struggles in her mind as the eerie feeling of having your every move watched, and that, of course, feels very of these times.
On the other hand, I still sense a relative lack of critical and fan enthusiasm for All Born Screaming. My theory is that Clark has become a persona non grata due to her antics during the MASSEDUCTION press cycle and her even worse antics during the Daddy’s Home cycle. I could feel everyone’s eyes rolling into the back of their skulls during both these eras, though she got much more grace during the MASSEDUCTION cycle since the music was and continues to be amazing. The internet just kind of gave up on her, though, with Daddy’s Home. You’ll notice that it was her last album to earn her an SNL musical performer gig.
Daddy’s Home most noxiously bequeathed us with an interview-killing controversy, which said interviewer, Emma Madden, reflected on really insightfully the year afterward in The Creative Independent. And during the MASSEDUCTION cycle, Clark notoriously made interviewers crawl (yes, crawl) into her interviewing space and offered up canned, knowingly rude responses to questions she found boring. (Not to side with an ex of FKA twigs, but Robert Pattinson’s way of responding to boring interview questions is much better — and Pattinson’s association with the film Rotting in the Sun almost makes him one of us queers.) Journalist Molly Young, who profiled Clark for GQ in 2019, shared after her story was published that Clark was an exceptionally hostile interviewee; I’ve only had one or two hostile interviewees whatsoever in my entire career interviewing people. We live at a time when the internet is ready to turn on any famous person at the turn of the hat, often justifiably so, and though Clark’s actions are nowhere close to as awful as that of, say, her friend Johnny Depp (sighhhhhh), I get it if some folks just don’t want to engage with her anymore.
Or maybe it’s just that, in 2024, audiences queer and otherwise seemed to engage more with Top 40 than indie music in a way that exceeded previous years, with the caveat that poptimism has been the default for like 15 years (and I’m happy about it). I can think of very few people who ended 2024 not stanning Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, and/or Chappell Roan, including some boomers in my immediate family. By the time of 2024’s denouement (sorry for the SAT word but also this word slaps), the pop girlies were front and center, and All Born Screaming, by a pop-rock-but-mostly-rock-girlie, was an early 2024 release.
Even I, a big-time St. Vincent fan, kind of forgot about All Born Screaming by late summer, and I only found myself giving the album about two weeks of full attention as compared to my months-long obsessions with 2009’s Actor, St. Vincent’s second album, through MASSEDUCTION. Somehow, St. Vincent’s first self-produced album, on which Actor’s distorted dirges were reborn as hard-rock-adjacent, Dave-Grohl-assisted epics and on which she — for the first time since MASSEDUCTION — didn’t bring Jack Antonoff in as a co-producer is at once a brilliant achievement and not something I’ve really returned to. (Jack Antonoff is over-hated, they hate to see a bitch from Jersey winning, Jack Antonoff and I are both Bergen-County-hometown glasses-wearers who both vaguely look like thumbs, let us live.) Even the title track and closer with contributions from weird-rock savant Cate Le Bon, whom I love, feels like it should’ve been more forceful, more bonkers. I expected something as skullcrushing as “Broken Man” and got a good song that could be so much more. (This is why I said Lady Gaga did it better.)
I remember that, when my journalist friend Laura Studarus saw St. Vincent live last year, she lamented that Clark’s set was just a bravado-filled rock show and that, previously, her whole thing when performing live, especially during the MASSEDUCTION tour, had been taking the piss out of exactly those types of shows. Maybe, in becoming the thing she once lamented, Clark’s music, though still excellent in my opinion, has stopped glomming on as much. Maybe we’re all missing the draggy aesthetics of, you know, this whole getup from the MASSEDUCTION tour. Or maybe we’ve grown weary of the St. Vincent persona, even if All Born Screaming should, at least musically, be celebrated as its culmination. Or maybe Clark’s antics have simply gotten her something close to cancelled. As I listen to All Born Screaming now, I’m still enraptured, but I’m not as keen to immediately listen again. A year into its lifetime, All Born Screaming has lost some of its shine, but deep in the grime, there’s still plenty of reward.
Please read this New York Times opinion piece about Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest being the greatest threat to free speech since the Red Scare. I’m not alone in feeling that Khalil’s detention and the circumstances around it — in particular, the fact that he is not being charged with a crime and that it is extraordinarily rare for one’s green card to be revoked — portend the beginning of a major suppression of basic human rights that we urgently need to figure out how to fight back against. And we’ve already lost so many of our rights as it is. Plus, if even the New York Times is allowing its opinion writers to express outrage against the detention of pro-Palestinian student protestors, the tides are clearly shifting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Max Freedman launched the LGBTQ+ music newsletter Lavender Sound in January 2025 to create an online writing community by and for LGBTQ+ people about LGBTQ+ music. They also interview artists for The Creative Independent, which is their favorite website (they really want you to read their Jaboukie Young-White interview), and they’ve previously contributed music criticism to Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and Paste. Their pronouns are whatever float your boat ⛴️💜
St Vincent is still in a league of her own.
i think so many new artists have taken the spotlight like Chapell...
Terrific insights, even to the "common listener" in a incredibly well thought out review