St. Vincent

The rock iconoclast on jamming with herself, co-writing Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer," and the power of love

- BRIAN HIATT

'I ve known I was going to make a record called All Born Screaming since I was 23," says St. Vincent. "But I just wasn't ready. I wasn't really worthy of the title, 'cause you have to live a lot to be worthy of a title that really says it all. It's the beauty, it's the brutality, and it's all part of the same continuum." St. Vincent's superb new album of that name is suffused with beauty and brutality in equal measure, with Nine Inch Nails-worthy noise bursts, some elegant crooning, and a few of her most streamlined hard-rock tracks ever, some assisted by Dave Grohl on drums. There are also a few entirely unexpected moments on the album, which is the first the artist, 41, has produced on her own, including the off-kilter dub reggae of "So Many Planets," which she spiced with a jazzy guitar solo meant to evoke Larry Carlton's playing with Steely Dan. "So much of making this record was, like, everything has to be tactile," she says. "It has to start with electricity and analog circuitry. It has to be touched."

This album seems a lot more direct and unguarded than your past work.

In past records, I've been very interested in the idea of persona and iconography. I realized I've done that in my work because I'm queer. I've known that gender is performance since I was a child. But this record isn't about persona or identity. It's just about, like, life and death and love, and how in some ways life is impossible but we get to live it. We've only got one of them, depending on your belief system.