LAST YEAR,
St. Vincent channelled Portishead with The Roots on The Tonight Show,
covered David Bowie’s Young Americans for the Love Rocks NYC charity, and
sang Running Up That Hill to induct Kate Bush into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
This year, though, Annie Clark gets back to being herself, with the follow-up album to 2021’s superb
Daddy’s Home. “Nobody knows anything about it yet,” she says to MOJO, composed and charismatic, down the line from Los Angeles. “You’re the first person I’ve talked to, really, about it…”
Work began, she says, immediately after
Daddy’s Home. “Right after I finish a record, I like to start writing another one,” she says. “You have a burst of creative output, like the boot is off your neck, once something is in the can, as it were… ‘in the can’ is like I’m thinking about film canisters, right? But that also could sound like something’s in the toilet.”
She worked in spaces including her own Compound Fracture studio in LA, Electric Lady in New York and Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio in Chicago. It was, she says, her first purely self-produced set. “I needed to go deeper in finding my own sonic vocabulary,” she says. “I like to think of [the record] as post-plague pop, it’s a lot about heaven and hell – the metaphorical kinds. Which is appropriate, because sitting alone in a studio for that many hours I would say is a version of hell.”
She’s tight-lipped on song-specifics, but confirms that contributing musicians include
Dave Grohl, Cate Le Bon and Foo Fighters new drummer Josh Freese (“a pretty tight little Wrecking Crew”). One song, she reveals, is “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.”
Was this mindset, wonders MOJO, engendered by the “post-plague”/Covid malaise? “I think so,” she says. “That kind of isolation breeds paranoia and loneliness, and loneliness can breed violence. It’s been a time of loss collectively and personally. [But] loss and death are very clarifying things, they make everything that doesn’t fucking matter go away.”
It seems the soundworld of the album, which features ’70s and ’80s analogue synths and “lots of guitars”, is also on the edge. “It sounds urgent and psychotic, in equal parts the most caustic sound and also, I think, the most sonically blooming,” says Clark. “It’s high stakes and intentional.”
Suitably for a serial self-reinventor, it sounds something of a departure from the warped ’70s fantasias of
Daddy’s Home. “The last record, I was approaching tough subjects with a lot of biting humour and wit,” Clark says. “I put on a wig, I was prancing around, it was so fun. This record is darker and harder and more close to the bone. I’d say it’s my least funny record yet! There’s nothing cute about it.”
Is she concerned that she might alienate anyone? “I have tremendous faith in human beings,” she says. “The door is totally open. Let’s just talk and go there together. If they don’t want to, that’s fine too… I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s a record that basically talks about how life is impossible, but yet we get to live it – or, we might as well.”
