Gallery: St. Vincent at the Tabernacle

Last week, St. Vincent stopped in Atlanta. Annie Clark and her band played at the Tabernacle, delivering a career-spanning setlist heavy on gems from her 2024 album, All Born Screaming, including “Broken Man,” “Big Time Nothing,” and “Flea.” But she brought the house down, too, with “Los Ageless,” “Cheerleader,” “Pay Your Way in Pain,” and her encore song, “Candy Darling.”

In April of last year, St. Vincent was one of our Digital Cover stars. Editor Matt Mitchell wrote, “The era of Daddy’s Home couldn’t feel farther away than it does right now. Ever the matriarch of chameleonic alt-rock, Clark, now 41, has all but ditched the Candy Darling alter-ego she reveled in three years ago. When she did press back then, she would arrive on camera wearing a patterned headscarf and tinted aviator sunglasses; when she dropped Masseduction four years before that, journalists had to enter a neon pink-painted box if they wanted to ask her questions about the album. But this time around, there’s no performance involved in Clark’s presence on our Zoom call; no grandiose wardrobe to flaunt or skyscraping measure of method-acting to embolden. She walks around her house with her camera off, filling the spaces between her thoughts with various clatters. She even pauses our talk to answer a call from her sister, because she worries that ‘when anyone calls, it’s bad news.’ It’s clear, quickly, that I am not speaking with St. Vincent. This is Annie Clark, and she’s left the vainglory and theatricality behind—for now.”

In their review of the album, Eric Bennett wrote that “the concept of collapse runs rampant throughout All Born Screaming. Clark has long written about societal ills, whether they be social media narcissism, widespread vanity or the stifling nature of gender roles. Usually, she observes such topics with an outsider’s wit. On songs like ‘The Power’s Out’ and ‘Violent Times,’ the issues are all-consuming; she can’t escape their grasp. On the former, Clark narrates catastrophe with a newscaster’s unflappable affect. As she navigates a post-technological world, she describes things with a fatalistic romanticism while facing the void with acceptance: ‘It was pouring like a movie / Every stranger looked like they knew me / Handsome cowboys praying gothic said / I just remembered being happy.'”