Like the rest of us, Annie Clark is looking for a silver lining amid the overbearing darkness. About halfway through All Born Screaming, the engrossing, unpredictable and, at times, terrifying new album from the indie musician better known as St. Vincent, pummelling synths, grinding drones and monster riffs suddenly give way to sharp horns and the kind of cinematically sultry groove that could soundtrack a Bond movie.

“All the wasted nights fighting mortality, when in the ashes of Pompeii, lovers discovered in an embrace for all eternity,” Clark croons. It’s an image that seems to sum up the album’s central thesis: the world is f—ed, but maybe there’s hope in the fact it’s always been so?

“OK, the first half of the record is a little bit of a season in hell,” Clark laughs over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “It’s like walking through the fire and crawling over glass on your knees. But the second half of the record ends with an ecstatic mantra. Life is crazy, but we get to live it, and we’ve got to live it to its absolute fullest because it’s so short, and the only reason to do anything is love, and the only reason to live is for the people we love.”

After the conceptual swagger of 2021’s Daddy’s Home – a scungy, ’70s-leaning album based around her father’s release from prison for fraud and money laundering (it won her the Grammy for best alternative music album) – All Born Screaming is another departure in a career full of them for the 41-year-old.

Filled with industrial grind and squalling feedback, its sonic touchpoints veer towards Nine Inch Nails and Big Black. In Instagram clips taken during studio sessions, Clark looks like she’s styled herself after David Lynch’s Lost Highway (“I LOVE that movie,” she admits), all black leather and peroxide streaks. Even for an artist who played in a noise band called Skull F---ers back in college, this might be the heaviest Annie Clark’s ever been.

“I mean, [Skull F---ers] was noisier. But is this the hardest? Aspects of it, sure,” she says. “There are parts of it that are very much like songs screamed from the basement of your guts. But, in a strange way, it’s some of my most romantic stuff, too, in the classical sense.”

It’s never a walk in the park when a musician cites Goya’s Black Paintings as their aesthetic starting point, but here we are. Clark recalls seeing the Spanish painter’s works at Madrid’s Prado Museum and being deeply affected. “Oh, you walk in that room and the temperature goes down. It’s like, whoa,” she says. “What trips me out with those paintings is that he was living with them in his house; that was, like, his living room. The fact he lived with that, that it wasn’t necessarily what he was trying to show the world, but it was his psyche, I found it so incredible.”

Like lead single Broken Man, Reckless – a death ballad that fuses The Birthday Party and Throbbing Gristle – is relentlessly bleak, Clark repeating that she’s “cracking up”. She’s hinted that the album came out of an unspecified period of grief and bereavement, but it’s not hard to draw a wider line from the album’s industrial aesthetic to a world in sociopolitical despair and ecological decline. Industrial music came out of Europe’s post-punk, Cold War malaise; why did she feel it spoke to our current landscape?

“If I may be so philosophical, I think artists are the psychic mirrors of the society that they live in. It’s like having an antenna up to a certain level of violence or chaos and then taking it and trying to make sense of it,” she says. “That’s art. So art is an act of hope, right? You take all the chaos, and you hash it out, you throw it about, and you turn it into something that makes you feel less alone.

“It’s like that thing Brian Eno says: art is the car that you can crash over and over again and walk away safely,” she adds. “It’s a place where you really can just explore it all. I think there’s an aspect of reaction to me, to just wanting to make something that was very raw and heavy. Life is short, we don’t have time to waste; so talk about the real shit and just go there, as deep as you can.”

For the first time, Clark entirely self-produced the album, locking herself in her studio with a set-up of modular synths and drum machines and making “post-industrial dance music” for hours on end, sometimes with the aid of mushrooms. “It was important to me that everything had to start with electricity and chaos, turning knobs and pushing buttons until something happened that felt like lightning in a bottle,” she says.

To help capture the power she sought, she brought in an array of literal heavy hitters: Foo Fighters drummer Josh Freese, Aussie export Stella Mozgawa, and Dave Grohl, who drums on singles Broken Man and Flea. Clark and Grohl have been friends since she sang Lithium during Nirvana’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. “I think all those drummers are wonderful and special in different ways, but you hear one note of Dave Grohl, and you’re like, ‘That is f—ing Dave Grohl’. And I wanted him to come in and be exactly Dave Grohl.”

Understandably, Clark’s called All Born Screaming her “least funny record”. But for all its darkness, she still can’t resist an absurdist jab. On the epic closing track alone, she describes herself as “graffiti on a urinal in the abattoir” and personifies her misery as “a karaoke version of Leonard’s Hallelujah”, a line that’s already led to gleeful music press headlines. Even the album’s title boasts a slyly loaded wordplay that suggests, well, look where we came from; why wouldn’t this kind of frantic anxiety be our natural state?

“Right? I think it’s more psychotic to pretend like it isn’t,” Clark laughs. “But I think by ‘least funny record’, I kind of meant it’s not clever, it’s more emotionally stark. Because in order to be a musician, you always have to have a sense of humour, or you just won’t make it.”

Clark has spent a lifetime attuned to that particular brand of absurdity – from her teen years roadie-ing for her aunt and uncle’s jazz duo, and studying at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music while moonlighting in noise bands to earning her professional break as a member of The Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens’ touring band.

“I started in station wagons, and I moved up to minivans, and then I was in 12-passenger vans, and then I did tour buses; I’ve played to rooms of no one,” Clark recalls. “I’ve carried all my amps and accidentally booked a show at an AA meeting. I’ve done all that. You stay at the Super 8 behind the prison with blood on the sheets. You’re sleeping at a punk squat in Philly with somebody who has a ferret they don’t tell you about. So much of your journey as a musician is these hilariously decrepit circumstances. If you can’t laugh, you’re not gonna survive.”

In the space between Daddy’s Home and her new album, Clark has also found unlikely success atop the global pop charts. Cruel Summer, the song she co-penned with Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff for Swift’s 2019 album Lover, had an unexpected resurgence during Swift’s Eras Tour, when it was rediscovered on social media and climbed to No.1 on singles charts across the world, including Australia.

“Oh my gosh, it blew me away,” says Clark of the track’s trajectory. “I’m so amazed by Taylor’s fans. They took a song from many records ago that wasn’t even a single at the time, and they were just like, ‘No, this song is a hit’, and they willed it into being a hit. I’ve never seen anything like it, and nor have I ever been a part of anything like it.”

On Spotify, it’s become Swift’s most successful song of all, with over 2 billion streams. “That is so crazy,” says Clark. “Because think of all the billions of streams all her other massive hits have. It’s just so amazing to me that this happened.”

St. Vincent’s got her own streaming favourites – oddly, Roslyn, her collaboration with Bon Iver for Twilight: New Moon, released in 2009, tops the list with over 400 million streams – but nothing approaching the billions. Surely, she gets a nice chunk of change from the success Cruel Summer has had? “Um, I think that that is a crass question, so…” Clark defers, in a tone simultaneously playful and stern. Look, fair enough.

In another unexpected dalliance that’s seen Clark establish a reputation as an elder stateswoman to a new generation of young female pop stars, she’s also become a mentor of sorts to Taylor’s heir apparent, Olivia Rodrigo. Last December, she presented Rodrigo with Variety’s storyteller of the year award, praising the 21-year-old’s honesty and authenticity and describing her as “a precious baby angel muffin, but if a precious baby angel muffin was tough as nails and cool as hell”. Clark also co-wrote Rodrigo’s scorching Guts song, Obsessed.

“I don’t know about [the word] mentor, but she’s such a wonderful girl,” Clark says of Rodrigo. “We bonded because we really love the same music. I mean, she’s a kid who loves alternative music from the ’90s. That’s right up my alley.”

Well, sure, Rodrigo even took the Breeders on tour. “Isn’t that cool?” Clark says. “It’s so cool. I’ve just been so glad to know her. She’s a wonderful soul.”

Clark’s desire to play in such mainstream spaces is intriguing. Following 2017’s pop-leaning Masseduction, an album that saw her wilfully engaging with her public profile in the wake of tabloid-attracting romances with Kristen Stewart and Cara Delevingne (Young Lover might be the most damning celebrity break-up song this side of All Too Well), she appeared to opt out of the celebrity circus. Is she comfortable dipping her toe in those mainstream waters again?

“I’m just interested in music, I don’t necessarily look at it in terms of, ‘Oh, now I’m stepping into the pop world …’ It’s just one language I speak, and I’m always trying to get better at it,” says Clark. “As far as my own records and my own trajectory, I’ve genuinely just made the music I’m compelled to make at the time, and I don’t really think about the material places it might go. I know that sounds either really naive or a lie or stupid, but I just don’t think about it. I can’t think about it, it just makes me feel tired.”

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Her muse has also led her to other creative pursuits, including as a writer-director on the short horror film, The Birthday Cake, featured in the 2017 anthology XX, and as a subject-slash-actor in the metafictional 2020 mockumentary, The Nowhere Inn, with Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney and Portlandia. Before Kip Williams made it a worldwide phenomenon, Clark also pursued a gender-bending adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray that she was set to write and direct; she seems exasperated by its unending gestation. It’s there on IMDB, but is it still happening?

“I don’t know, you’d have to ask Hollywood,” she says. “It turns out that in Hollywood, you can do a lot of work on a project, and then it can, like, just never get made … I think what I love about music is I can have an idea and then go make it. Films are an entirely different beast. Also, I know how much work it took to make a 15-minute horror short, and making a feature film is years of your life. But maybe, someday.”

As ever, searching for the silver lining.

St. Vincent’s All Born Screaming is out on Friday, April 26.

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