St. Vincent is this generation's quintessential rock star. Her frenzied energy and unconventional approach to her interesting and brilliant catalogue are only surpassed guitar playing prowess. After a week or so teasing something new with street posters spotted on the street and posted on the internet.,
Featuring a full in-your-face retro groove, while maintaining confident sexuality, the single picks up from where her last album 2017's Masseduction left off. Its 70's-inspired stylings are deceptively introduced by a brief ragtime piano line that swiftly drops into the full groove, evoking Eurythmics' 'Sweet Dreams' for just a moment in its synth line From there its foundations of Sly And The Family Stone swag, a Bowie-esque bombast and Clark's trademark fearlessness all make the party that much better.
The single comes with a Bill Benz-directed video paying homage to something brilliantly camp from the 70's, all huge outfits, kaleidoscope lighting and a desirable lo-fi aesthetic.
Along with 'Pay Your Way In Pain', St. Vincent has also announced her hotly-anticipated sixth record Daddy's Home (out May 14 on Loma Vista Recordings), once again co-produced with Jack Antonoff who she first worked with on Masseduction.
“I would say it’s the sound of being down and out Downtown in New York, 1973. Glamour that hasn’t slept for three days,” she explains. "Music made in New York from 1971-76, typically post-flower child, kick the hippie idealism out of it, America’s in a recession but pre-disco, the sort of gritty, raw, wiggly nihilistic part of that. It’s not a glamorous time, there’s a lot of dirt under the fingernails. It was really about feel and vibe but with song and stories.”
She says the album is in part inspired by her father’s 2010 sentence to 12 years in jail for his role in a $43m stock-manipulation scheme, which came up in gossip coverage in 2016 while she dated Cara Delevingne. She says she didn’t need to dress up Daddy’s Home, a song about taking her father home from prison in 2019. The title is trademark St Vincent – ambiguous and unsettlingly kinky – but there is a sea change in sound and spirit. The old rushes are replaced by louche soul and something of a world-weary empathy, straddling the degradation of Sly and the Family Stone’s 1971 classic There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the tender spots of Stevie Wonder and the queer revelry of the 1974 Labelle concert at the Metropolitan Opera in New York that caused scandal within polite society.
“I didn’t have any perspective on it,” she told The Guardian of the time. “It was just this horrible, festering wound.”
Her father has been out for two years now and she’s finally opening up about it. His sentence affected her as far back as 2011 when she released and toured her breakout Strange Mercy album.
“I don’t have any regrets,” she said. “But I was pretty blotto for a while there.”
Apparently Dad is thrilled about the record, but Clark says the parental roles seem to have reversed.
"I feel like ‘daddy’ half the time, you know? He’s a person, and every person has a lot of facets, and a lot of shit they’ve done wrong, and good qualities. So it just is.”
Daddy’s Home is an 11-track offering and it’s set for release Friday, 14th May. You can check out the artwork and tracklisting for the release below.
Daddy's Home - out May 11th on Loma Vista Recordings
SIDE A
01. Pay Your Way In Pain 02. Down And Out Downtown 03. Daddy’s Home 04. Live In The Dream 05. The Melting Of The Sun 06. Humming Interlude 1 07. The Laughing Man
SIDE B
08. Down 09. Humming Interlude 2 10. Somebody Like Me 11. My Baby Wants A Baby 12. …At The Holiday Party 13. Candy Darling 14. Humming Interlude 3
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