"IS THIS PERSON VIRTUOSIC OR DO THEY TOTALLY SUCK? THAT'S KIND OF WHERE ILIVE!"

St. Vincent's new album sees her teaming up with two Foo Fighters, stealing Josh Homme's secret weapon, using Prince's favourite pedal and embarking on a prog odyssey. It also sees her return to real amps played real loud...

- Jenna Scaramanga

Annie Clark – aka St. Vincent – is finished, for now at least, with digital guitar tones. “I’ve done enough direct guitar sounds,” she declares. “I wanted to move some air again.” The result helps St. Vincent’s latest album, All Born Screaming, sound extremely human. “It sounds real because it is real,” Annie says of the record’s emotional content, but she could also be talking about the Marshall she used to express some of those emotions. When she wrote this record, Clark explains: “I personally was metabolising inward and outward violence. How do you make sense of  the human condition? It’s wild and fraught. I’m lucky in the way I get to try to make sense of everything, by making work that takes chaos and puts it into some kind of order, whether that’s literally, with electricity through circuitry, or in more esoteric ways.”

“Every record I make is just a direct reflection of what’s happening in life,” she continues. “I’m not really deconstructing persona or identity this time. That’s not really where my head is at. It was more, ‘Okay, life is very short. It’s in some ways very binary. You are alive or you are dead, and there’s not an in between. So if you’re alive, let’s go. Let’s live…’”

Living things need to breathe, and the guitars on the record mirror that, with roomy, ambient sounds. The vibey guitar licks on Big Time Nothing, for example: “That is my Music Man Goldie signature guitar through a reissue Marshall cranked in a room, with two Coles stereo ribbon mics for room sound.”