Lightning in a bottle

Midway through my interview with Annie Clark, AKA the critically lauded, Grammy-winning, art-rock experimentalist St Vincent, a thumbs-up emoji appears next to her head.

We are talking on Zoom, and Clark is waxing lyrical about her emotionally lacerating new album, the self-produced All Born Screaming. She lets out a sigh, mumbling something about a setting on her computer she can't change. She tests it again by doing an exaggerated double thumbs up, only for the screen to be filled with poorly animated fireworks. It all feels very surreal. "Maybe next time I say a solid quote, like a 'Let's make it the pullquote' one, I'll just put two thumbs up," she laughs.

It is not the first time Clark, 41, has attempted to subvert the interview experience, albeit this time accidentally. Around the release of 2017's Masseduction, her "morbidly funny", sad and sexy fifth album, she asked journalists to crawl into a freshly painted neon pink box to ask her questions. "I was sitting in paint fumes for 12 hours - as sadistic as it seemed, trust me it was way more masochistic," she laughs, referring to that time as the "latex era" because of how strict she was being on herself. It was an attempt to continue the severe nature of the album - a reaction to a painful dalliance with the tabloids following her high-profile relationship with model and actor Cara Delevingne in 2015; an aftershock that exploded her carefully curated mythos and its postmodern playfulness.

"To do interviews and to do press is a construct," she says in her glaringly white Los Angeles office (she splits her time between there and New York), looking like "goth Grey Gardens" in black silk headscarf, thick-framed sunglasses and a vintage Maison Margiela trenchcoat I mistake for a dressing gown. "Like I'm playing a role of this person and you're playing a role of that person and wouldn't it be interesting if we both acknowledge it was a construct and went from there. Maybe it would be more pure and more true if we did that," she continues before adding with a delicious cackle: "But then I think people were like, 'Oh she's a cunt'."