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Annie Clark made her recorded debut as St. Vincent in 2007 with Marry Me, quickly becoming regarded as one of the most innovative and fascinating presences in modern music. Her subsequent albums would include Actor (2009), Strange Mercy (2011), her self-titled fourth album and winner of the 2014 GRAMMY for Best Alternative Album.
In 2017, her fifth album MASSEDUCTION would break St. Vincent into the U.S. and UK top 10s and win two more GRAMMYs (Best Rock Song for its title track, and Best Recording Package). 2021’s Daddy’s Home found St. Vincent channeling the hungover glamor and gritty sepia-toned soundtrack of 1970s downtown NYC to an ecstatic reception, ultimately winning her a second Best Alternative Album GRAMMY.
Following a 2021-2022 global tour that reaffirmed St. Vincent’s status as one of live music’s preeminent forces with headline appearances at the likes of the Hollywood Bowl and Radio City Music Hall, Clark would begin work on album number seven: Her first fully self-produced album (having co-produced every one of her previous efforts)—and third Best Alternative Album GRAMMY winner— All Born Screaming is St. Vincent at her most primal.
Featuring Clark leading “a curated group of rippers” through the brawny “Broken Man” (her second Best Rock Song GRAMMY winner), infectious Best Alternative Performance GRAMMY-winning “Flea,” and mordant catwalk sashay through deafening assault of self-loathing that is “Big Time Nothing,” All Born Screaming is equal parts spiritual desolation and rapturous acceptance.
“If you’re born screaming, that’s a great sign,” says Clark, “because it means you’re breathing. You’re alive. My god. It’s joyous. And then it’s also a protest. We’re all born in protest in a certain way. It’s terrifying to be alive, it’s ecstatic to be alive. It’s everything.”
In her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion writes about documenting the everyday, unexceptional occurrences that make up a life. The point is to remember, in her words: “How it felt to be me.” Notice that, in Didion’s view, a notebook doesn’t chronicle how it feels, but rather how it felt, and this distinction matters, because time passes, feelings change, our memories solidify or they slip away if we’re not paying attention.
Ask the Brooklyn-based Hello Mary what their eponymous debut album is about, and they’ll pause for a long while before responding, not because they’re unsure, but because the answer seems so ordinary, so mundane. “This might sound vague,” drummer/vocalist Stella Wave warns, “but to me, this album is about accepting the state of things as they are at a given moment, whether it’s your relationship to another person or the world around you.” Pinpointing an individual thought pattern, or resounding theme, risks flattening the trio, who write music and lyrics in tandem, knotting their perspectives together into a singular consciousness. “We collaborate on everything,” bassist Mikaela Oppenheimer says, “from our lyrics to guitar parts and even bass and drums sometimes.”
Oppenheimer started the band with Helena Straight (guitar, vox) as freshmen in high school. When they met Wave by happenstance the three became an inseparable unit – as good of friends as they are bandmates. In 2020 they released their debut EP, Ginger and they followed that with 4 additional singles – “Evicted,” “Take Something,” and “Sink In” b/w “Stinge.” It was the singles – which unlike the EP were recorded in a proper studio – that garnered the band attention outside the confines of the Brooklyn music community. Wave describes them as the first proper introduction to Hello Mary. They led Julia Cumming of Sunflower Bean to laud them as her “ favorite new band” and Tonya Donnelly to call them the,”very rare band who nod to their influences while sounding completely new.” KEXP has since had them into their studios for a session. And it also led them to sign to the esteemed indie-label Frenchkiss Records.
Hello Mary – which was produced by Bryce Goggin (Pavement /Luna) – references alternative rock of the nineties alongside Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley as influences, heard most vividly on the album’s simmering closer “Burn it Out,” but their contemporaries are bands like Palberta, Spirit of the Beehive, and Palehound, artists who don’t shy from unusual time signatures, careening feedback, and unconventional harmonies, all for the sake of surprising a listener. The album’s “Looking Right Into the Sun,” a song most honestly described as “delightful,” is driven by a tight and dynamic rhythm section that gives way to Straight’s crystalline and confident falsetto.
The album was written during a period of immense uncertainty. “We were battling things personally, the world was battling COVID,” Wave says. So there’s a darkness to it that isn’t apparent on first listen. Yet prioritizing sensation over narrative cohesion opens up the ability to make even the most lyrically devastating songs pleasurable. On the psychedelic “Spiral,” Straight and Wave harmonize to dazzling effect on the chorus, while Oppenheimer’s driving bassline tethers them to earth. “Is it a coincidence? You’re hanging out all night, while I’m on the other side,” they sing to an unknown other. “We’re singing about the paranoia that comes along with relationships, the sense of jealousy that feels like you’re on the outside of things,” Stella says. Relatability gives way to absurdity, too, an example of which arrives in the form of “Special Treat,” which opens with disarming harmonies that might recall a schoolyard taunt, or something more sinister, like the summoning of a coven. The earwormy “Rabbit” is, at its core, a straight ahead rock song that features one rock-star-esque guitar solo.
For a fledgling band, Hello Mary has enviable range, flitting between rock stylings with the ease of studied musicians. They’ve been doing this for a long time, albeit in dorm rooms and the privacy of their parents’ homes, but now they’re offering the product of hours of intimate, synergistic collaboration to the world. Hello Mary abolishes the individual in favor of collective catharsis, and though its singular meaning eludes the band for the time being, decades on it will articulate the most elusive feeling: “How it felt to be us.”
