St. Vincent ‘All Born Screaming’ Review: A Playful and Ferocious Tribute to Art and Nature

“This revolution isn’t fun,” Annie Clark sings toward the end of All Born Screaming. That lyric might be an apt descriptor for St. Vincent’s seventh studio album—if it wasn’t such a thrill. The album finds Clark at her most fragile and ferocious, seeking beauty among the waste and wreckage of 21st-century life. Itself a beautifully ugly thing, All Born Screaming is a visceral examination of art and nature when both are pushed to the brink.

The ominously titled opening track, “Hell Is Near,” begins with the sound of war drums. Amid a desolate landscape of empty cups, half-burned candles, and ash on linoleum, Clark finds and fixates on a single sign of life: a can full of marigolds. “Begin again,” she sings, her voice soaring. Just as jangly guitars attempt to lure us into a state of naïve optimism and psychedelic synths and swirling piano seem to promise hope, the track fades into harrowing noise.

This industrial soundscape—which continues on “Reckless,” in which Clark sings of storms and shipwrecks before launching abruptly into an apocalyptic outro of industrial drones and horror-movie string stabs—defines the self-produced All Born Screaming. The next track, “Broken Man,” is centered around a pulsing drum machine whose percolating tones sound like a robot digging for gold in a dark cave. Clark’s heavy electric guitars lock into the beat, offering a decidedly modern take on Nine Inch Nails’s digital-meets-analog approach.

“Big Time Nothing” adds funk to the equation and grooves even harder. Clark layers disco guitars into the mix, a fashionable ingredient that sounds fresh within the track’s cavernous atmosphere. The song exhilaratingly culminates in a strange piecemeal guitar solo akin to something David Byrne might’ve come up with for one of his Brian Eno sessions. It has the feel of a song disassembling itself in real time, without ever letting up the groove.

With All Born Screaming, Clark supposes that love is possible even in the end times. Destruction and doubt permeate songs like the cinematic “Violent Times” and the devastating “The Power’s Out.” “‘Ladies and gentleman, do remember me smiling,’ the queer on the train said as she jumped off the platform,” Clark sings on the latter. It’s a crushing lyric, itself something of a response to the question posed in “Violent Times” about love in wartime.

Clark longs for a safe space, contextualizing the plight of the artist within the plight of the planet. “She isn’t smiling, but she’s happy you’re here, we’ll make a killing from her trauma,” the singer declares on the reggae-infused “So Many Planets.” Is the “she” in question Clark or Mother Nature herself? When natural beauty is stripped for parts and viewed as nothing more than a resource, she asks, where do we draw the line between admiration and exploitation?

The closest All Born Screaming gets to answering the existential questions it poses is on “Sweetest Fruit,” which opens with a tribute to late electronic artist Sophie, who fell to her death from a rooftop in 2021 while trying to get a better look at the moon. “The sweetest fruit is on the limb,” Clark sings. Whether we make it or not, she seems to suggest, the beauty is in the reach.