“Who do you think I am? Like you’ve never seen a broken man,” St. Vincent rages, thrashing around and combusting in the visuals for 'Broken Man', the first single off her new record All Born Screaming. The flames never go out, but the layers of personas and fronts Annie Clark have painstakingly built across her storied career are burnt off, revealing all the raw emotional pandemonium at her core.

Yet in the fires of that hell, there is exultation. “You can't be more alive than kind of being on fire,” she tells me over Zoom.

In all its rough-hewn and distorted glory, the album has turned out to be something akin to what she has described as “the sounds inside her head,” and perhaps thus far, the most unbridled version of her ever put on tape.

All Born Screaming is Clark’s first self-produced album as St. Vincent, after her prior releases onboarding the equally prolific Jack Antonoff as co-producer. This includes 2021’s Daddy’s Home, a project exploring '70s “post-flower children and pre-gay disco and pre-punk,” and even the soundtrack to the 2020 mockumentary The Nowhere Inn starring herself, Carrie Brownstein, and Dakota Johnson. She doesn’t downplay being “so lucky” to have amassed a cast of illustrious collaborators either: the likes of David Byrne (Love This Giant), Nirvana, Sufjan Stevens, Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo ('Obsessed'), Taylor Swift ('Cruel Summer'), and so much more.

But to her, creating it in solitude has not only been “a place of comfort,” but also felt “necessary.” She adds in our call, “With the sort of emotionality and the places I needed to go emotionally, I just knew that it was a journey I kind of had to take alone.”

“I’m lucky enough to be seven solo records in and know myself,” she tells Kevan Kenney on KROQ. “I’m always just trying to make music that is exciting to me, that makes me feel something, that matters, that’s exactly what about what’s going on in my life at any given time, and try to take all of the chaos of life and put it into some kind of order in music – and find out what I think and how I feel.”

As we hop on the call, we discuss the genesis of the record and the elements that have shaped it, and effuse about her stellar roster of contributors – the likes of Dave Grohl, Justin Meldal-Johnsen (a prolific musician who has worked with the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Beck, Air, etc.), Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, Cate Le Bon, and conceptual artist Alex Da Corte.

We dive into this paean to life, love, and loss – cornerstones of the human condition – and why screaming in the face of and accepting the scorching brutality of it all is good: because that’s a sign we’re alive.

It’s been a while since I last saw you live – 2015 in Singapore, actually – the 'Digital Witness' era.

Oh, my God. I had such a bad haircut.

Not at all. You looked fabulous then. I even remember the black latex cheongsam and all that.

Thank you! Bless you.

Is something like a tour – playing music for people all around the world – something you look forward to again?

I. Love it. So much. It's so wonderful that people come to the shows and cheer and all that stuff. But I don't love it because I get to get up on stage and people love me for an hour and a half. That's not it. I love it because it's the only time when it's, like, socially sanctioned for a bunch of people to go on stage, go crazy together, dream the same dream, and feel truly alive at its best – and feel kind of inexplicably alive, like we get to be shocked and consoled and surprised. That’s what I want out of a live show as an audience member, and that's what I want to give people, like, “Hey, let's go to another planet for an hour and a half.”

So, the new record is called All Born Screaming. When was the last time you screamed?

Yesterday. (laughs)

Coming from Daddy’s Home, and of course, The Nowhere Inn, your film with Carrie Brownstein, how did you arrive here?

Well, I think The Nowhere Inn was a fun kind of spoof on the idea of rock stars and persona, and what happens when somebody really loses the plot and starts to become not just a parody of themselves but also starts to do monstrous things in hopes of getting attention. I think that my friend Carrie Brownstein and I explored that idea in a weird fashion.

And then Daddy's Home was like kind of a way for me to sort of process a whole lot of life, kind of through the lens of this of this music that I loved, which is music from New York from 1970 to 1975.

I think that Daddy's Home in some ways was like almost me learning a different new language and trying to speak it and trying to write my songs in it, whereas All Born Screaming, I think, is like me actually trying to invent my own language. So, it's a little bit of a different exercise, a different journey.

What was the impetus for this record? Was there a track that was kind of the breakthrough for you in developing it?

The first track I wrote specifically for this record was 'Broken Man', and I think that it goes to a place of honesty and true sort of unhingedness that was like a tent pole in the making of the record. Like it became sort of the North Star.

Not that everything needed to sound like it, but that it needed to kind of be the most unhinged version of me on the record, and it became a sort of emotional North Star for the record. In a way, every other song had to at least go as hard emotionally somewhere.

This is your first self-produced album as St. Vincent. Was it a conscious decision to move out of your usual collaborative spaces and venture into somewhere more solitary? What’s it like to be in that headspace and what’s the best part of it?

I mean, I've been recording myself in in my room on early digital recording software since I was probably 14 or 15 years old. So that's sort of how I learned how to be what I sound like. And that's how I learned how to create what I was too shy to do, like join a band with original material. I was like, “No, I can be in my room, and I can sing and I can play and I can learn how to arrange.” And I can just try things out. Just solitary.

So, it's a very comfortable space for me. It's a very necessary space for me, I think, in a lot of ways. And I have loved working with other people, and I've had the pleasure of great collaborators my whole career. But this record, with the sort of emotionality and the places I needed to go emotionally, I just knew that it was a journey I kind of had to take alone. I had to find my voice not just as a singer, a guitar player, and songwriter, which I obviously have, but my real voice as a producer. And there are just certain journeys you can only take alone.

You previously told Alex Da Corte that the record moves away from the personas that you’ve crafted throughout your work. Like, the project is more akin to the “sounds that are inside of your head.” How would you describe these sounds, and how have you been able to transpose these to the sonic palette we now hear?

Well, I would say that I came up with a whole lot of the material on this record, and the genesis of a lot of songs was me playing with analogue modular synths. And when you're playing with analogue modular synths, you're playing with electricity and circuitry, and when you're playing with electricity and circuitry, you're playing with chaos. You are at the helm of chaos, like a god of lightning. And you are basically a child mind exploring. You are just searching and finding.

So, I would set up all my machines and sort of jam, as it were, on these machines for hours and hours. And then I would comb through and find the moments that were so exciting to me that I just had to write a song around them. So that would be a song like 'Broken Man', 'Sweetest Fruit', or 'Big Time Nothing'. That was the kind of genesis of making the record.

And I think it's very important as an artist to write on machines or instruments that you don't know very well because you get to be an absolute beginner. And that's important for a sense of wonder.

You enlisted the help of several big names, to name a few: Dave Grohl, Cate Le Bon – notably also on your title track – Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Stella Mozgawa... Given the solo situation, how was the process like with these guests around?

Yes, yes! Oh my gosh! I mean, I'm so lucky. I'm lucky enough to be friends with people who are musicians, artists, and producers in their own right who I hold in such high esteem. I learned so much from everyone I worked with.

Cate Le Bon, for example, kind of came in at a time when I was a bit petulant with the making of the record. And I just had lost my way. I just had lost the plot. I couldn't see anything except through the lens of my own self-loathing, and Cate really kind of held my hand and said, “You know, you're crazy, but you're not that crazy.”

And then Justin Meldal-Johnsen is one of the best bass players on the planet. But he's also an incredible producer in his own right and a real gearhead. And I'd call it a head – I don't know if that's lingo that translates – like, somebody who really knows what they're talking about. Like every obscure post-punk band that ever existed, you know? Like, fully versed in everything 4AD from the '80s – and even that's mainstream. He's always a real head, and he was just so helpful. I could actually hit him up, call him, and be like, “Hey, how did they get this sound on that thing?” And he would know. “Hey, remind me again what drum machine they used on ‘Blue Monday’. Great. 707? Great. Check.” So that kind of stuff. He was an incredible resource there.

And Dave Grohl is Dave Grohl. I mean, he is just the coolest. And he brings so much power and energy and enthusiasm and is just force of life to everything he does.

There’s also Alex Da Corte's visuals. You’ve worked together before, notably on 'New York', and we all notice the stark contrast with ‘Broken Man’: not just visually, but energy-wise, too. How has your teamwork shaped this entire project or its parts?

Alex, I played him the record in Madrid because we were both there at the same time. And never in my life thought that he'd want to be involved in the creative direction because he's so major in the art world. But he was really inspired by the record. And we went around and looked at everything at The Prado and saw Francisco Goya's Black Paintings, [Hieronymus Bosch’s] The Garden of Earthly Delights, and then talked extensively about the work of people like Sophy Rickett and Félix González-Torres and came up with this idea of kind of being on fire, you know – obviously a nod to Robert Longo as well... So, yeah. You can't be more alive than kind of being on fire.

You said we go through a “season of hell” in the first half of the album, then it all ends with a “mantra”, a promise, in the form of the title track. I love that realisation, that catharsis is the only recourse and protest in the face of pain, and we’re not alone in it. For you, what happens in the breathing spaces? Those times when you’re not screaming?

I think that the people we love, they live on through us. And we just take every lesson we ever learned from them and just try to keep marching forward because that's the only thing you can do.

Minimal edits have been made to this interview for clarity.

Listen to All Born Screaming here:

St. Vincent is currently on tour. View the dates and stops here.