St. Vincent

Annie Clark has been making music under the name St. Vincent since 2007, and the thing that tends to get lost in any conversation about her is how funny she is. Not comedian funny, not irony funny. Actually funny. The kind of funny that makes the art stranger and better and harder to dismiss.

Her debut, Marry Me, arrived when she was twenty-five and immediately positioned her as a technical guitar player with something wrong about her in the best possible way. The songs were structured and intelligent and a little off. The voice was precise but not clean in the way that radio wanted. She did not belong to one genre, which in 2007 was still considered a problem rather than a selling point.

She spent the next decade making that not-belonging into a complete aesthetic. Strange Mercy in 2011 was when the distortion started taking over. Actor had been beautiful and slightly sinister. Strange Mercy was both of those things plus something uncomfortable that you could not quite name. The guitar tones were wrong. The arrangements were too dense. The songs were about dissociation and performance and the specific loneliness of being smart in a room full of people who want you to play the game. People started paying very close attention.

St. Vincent, the 2014 album, won a Grammy and introduced the world to what she looks like when she leans all the way into artifice. The pink hair. The sculptural posture. The deadpan interviews about being a robot. It was all performance, and the performance was sincere, which is the only kind that works. She was not pretending to be a pop star. She was making a record about pretending to be a pop star and somehow the record was genuinely great pop music.

MassEducation, her 2018 solo piano companion to MASSEDUCTION, was the quietest pivot. The same songs, stripped down to voice and Cate Le Bon’s piano, and suddenly you could hear what the lyrics were actually doing. They were doing a lot. The record made a strong case that Clark is as good a songwriter as anyone working right now, which is something that the guitars and the production occasionally obscure.

Her 2021 collaboration with Carrie Brownstein, Dad I’m in Jail, only confirmed what anyone following her closely already knew: she is also very good at comedy, which is not unrelated to being good at pop music. Both require a feel for timing and a willingness to be unsympathetic.

What makes St. Vincent singular is not any one record but the through line across all of them, the insistence on control paired with a genuine appetite for chaos. Every album sounds exactly like what she wants it to sound like, and what she wants it to sound like is always a little bit wrong in a way that ends up being exactly right. She is one of the most consistent and restless artists working in American music. That combination is rarer than it should be.